He's bloody right. And Roshan has some points. Actually, I think his idea of only moving stable extensions into the core distribution isn't that bad. I have had issues with some of the extensions Roshan mentioned, as well. There wasn't much I could do about it, but it was annoying.
Rasmus, Andi, whoever, you're missing the point here. You cannot simply dodge arguments like these by pointing at the fact that PHP is open source. If you develop software, be it open or closed sourced, and this software becomes a great success, you bear some responsibility. Microsoft with it's 95% browser market share (and I don't care if it's 80%, 10%, 99%, whatever, that's not the point here) has the responsibility to continue development of Internet Explorer, because otherwise the progress in web technology (I'm talking about client-side stuff here, CSS, XHTML, foo, bar) basically stalls, as there is no way you can convince all IE users to move over to Firefox. Same thing goes for PHP. You've developed something tens or houndreds of thousands of developers all over the world are using. They rely on what you tell them, their businesses rely on that, they need to move on, they need reliable, stable software. Software they have trust in, software they believe is made by people listening to their concerns and needs. And if you here tell them that you don't give a whatever on what they're thinking, you're virtually kneeing them in the guts. This discussion is not about the extensions being experimental. It's about the sad issue that here and there these and those people proudly or not proudly announce that you can do this with PHP, that you can do that, that you can even do... whatever; that every single foobar extension comes bundled, and all together it's the coolest web development environment around. Actually, PHP _is_ the coolest web development environment around. But it has it's rough edges, one of them being inconsistencies from release to release, which happens sometimes. This is annoying, I guess to a lot of people. Most of them don't complain. I don't complain either, and Roshan didn't. Because we know that a lot of highly competent people do their very best to improve PHP, they invest a lot of their free time and probably don't get any reward for it. But what Daniel, Roshan and I don't like is the weird attitude shown by some here on the list. That put-a-sock-in-it-and-fix-it-yourself-or-buzz-of kind of behavior, which is nothing but improper. David > -----Original Message----- > From: Daniel C. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2004 5:27 AM > To: Rasmus Lerdorf > Cc: Naik, Roshan; [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: Re: [PHP-DEV] Unfulfilled promises... forever experimental > extensions... all over again > > Here we have a polite, if provocative, email, and two very nasty and > rude responses to it. Followed by a polite response from Roshan. If > you walk into a room and see an argument where one side is yelling and > being rude, and one person is responding calmly and politely, who > would you automatically (given no other information) assume is right? > > Just a thought from an outside observer. > Dan > > > On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Naik, Roshan wrote: > <snip Roshan's thoughtful and polite email> > > On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:42:11 -0700 (PDT), Rasmus Lerdorf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > Wow, that was quite a rant from someone who hasn't contributed a damn > > thing. > > Ranting at a bunch of volunteers is utterly useless and > counterproductive. > > If you do that, your words might mean something. > > On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 18:06:32 -0700, Andi Gutmans <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Thanks for this quite useless and unproductive email. > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php