Hey Arvids, Hey all

On 12.05.23 17:48, Arvids Godjuks wrote:
On Fri, 12 May 2023 at 18:12, Andreas Heigl <andr...@heigl.org> wrote:

Hey Larry, Hey all

On 12.05.23 16:42, Larry Garfield wrote:
On Fri, May 12, 2023, at 11:57 AM, Jakub Zelenka wrote:
On Fri, Apr 28, 2023 at 11:00 AM Jakub Zelenka <bu...@php.net> wrote:

Hi,

The vote is now open for the RFC about introduction of the PHP
Technical
Committee:

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php_technical_committee

Regards


The voting ended with 10 yes votes and 21 no votes. It means that the
RFC
has been declined. Thanks for voting.

Regards

Jakub

For those who voted no, I would kindly ask: What is your alternative?

We have an organizational/structural problem.  This isn't really
debatable.  An eager new contributor was just bullied out of contributing,
and the one process we have for dealing with it (RFCs) failed miserably to
handle the situation.

Ignoring the problem is a bad option.  If the TC proposal isn't your
preferred way to address it, OK, what is?  "Do nothing, it's OK if people
occasionally get bullied out of contributing" is not an answer.

The internals list has not only recently "failed" miserably. That is not
to say that it has been like that since time immemoriable and should
therefore stay like that. On the contrary.

But we already have a group that has "the say" in PHP. The PHP Group is
mentioned in each and every source-file as they are the licence-holder.

Instead of adding another group I would rather see that existing group
to be filled with new life.

Whether that is the right group to tell people in the internals list off
is IMO questionable.

In essence to me the internals list is a group that discusses technical
topics regarding PHPs sources. The outcome and the vote whether
something will become part of the code is then voted on in an RFC. That
is a rather democratic process. When people are not able to convince the
majority of the voters that their idea is a good idea for the PHP
sources then it might not be a good idea. Having a group of people with
elevated privileges in that process is against that long lived and
established current process. And it looks like internals is not yet at
that point.

Having a group of people that make sure that the tone on the list is
civil, on-topic and inviting to newcomers is a different story. But that
was not what the vote was about.

So for me there already is an elevated group that has a bit more to say
regarding the PHP-sources as they are the once "owning" the licence.
Adding a second group with elevated privileges regarding code-decissions
will not help in keeping the mailinglist civilised and welcoming.

On a sidenote: I'd rather try to find a new solution for the PHP Group
as licence holder. So the idea of having an elected comitee that coupd
perhaps replace the PHP Group was tempting!

So my alternative would be for everyone to every now and then reread
https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/master/docs/mailinglist-rules.md

And as a second step to make internals more welcoming and inclusive
might be to have people keep an eye on the tone that can intervene when
the debate gets too heated. Those IMO need to be respected people and
their influence is in those matters purely on keeping the tone civilized
and not have a veto right in regards to code. The internals list and in
the end the vote on an RFC should have the last say in regards to code.

My 0.02€

Cheers

Andreas

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| Andreas Heigl                                                       |
| mailto:andr...@heigl.org                  N 50°22'59.5" E 08°23'58" |
| https://andreas.heigl.org                                           |
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| https://hei.gl/appointmentwithandreas                               |
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Hello Andreas!

I think what Larry is asking are ideas on actual solutions,  what steps
should be made and working out how those recent situations should have been
solved/handled. Really it does not matter if will it be PHP Group or some
called something else. There has been a lot of discussion off the list in
communities among PHP developers and nobody considers the recent events as
something that should have happened.

The time to "let's throw around some ideas" has passed. The current
situation highly reminds me of the year prior to the introduction of the
RFC process: this going down a hill at a rapid pace and a lot of people
yelling "la la la la" while plugging their ears.
The world has changed, and the new breed of developers has grown up in a
very different environment. I personally as a developer am a completely
different person and I do not accept what has been a norm 5-10 years ago
today. The development world moved on, it changed radically.
It's time to be the big boys and accept that what worked past 10-20 years
is not acceptable any more and the project has to adapt to the modern
times. I already wrote about how ridiculous the decision not to include
cleanup is. It's like a "birds against flying" campaign...


I've personally have been talking to a few people with core dev access
about figuring out a way to introduce some kind of communication and
coordination type people to the project, whose role is to filter out "the
noise", communicate with the community, put concisely feedback for the
technical people so they don't have to be forced to communicate when they
don't want to (and I see a lot of RFC's basically being ignored by a
majority of the voters then to suddenly speak up after the fact). And those
people could help mediate the process - making sure things just don't get
abandoned just because everybody flipped over their tables and stormed off.

In the modern day, people expect a very different style of communication.
And, sadly, those are the people who make decisions like "should we abandon
PHP and move to Go or JavaScript" and so on.
The other part that irks me a lot how php.net is developed - while it is
fine and it works, I have seen people lose all interest as soon as they
open the code. Nobody wants to touch it. And nobody wants to be responsible
for it too as far as I can tell.
The windows build machine.... I really don't have to explain anything here,
do I?

Larry asked what alternatives those who voted "No" see.

My main topic that I seem not to have been able to get across is that to me there is no need to implement alternatives as everything is already there.

* We have rules for the list.
* We have a workflow that should prohibit stuff getting into the core from new developers without at least a second set of eyes and in case of strong disagreement a separate discussion * We have an elected group of people that has the say about the part of the source that they are responsible for

That is my personal opinion and the reason why I did vote the way I voted.

This is not "throwing around some ideas".

If you want to know what my next steps would be (now we are throwing around ideas): Hire someone that makes sure that we are actually observing the rules that are already there?

Which brings us to another point that you mentioned: PHP is solely based on voluntary development. Some core-devs are paid by the community via the PHPFoundation. But in essence that is still based on voluntary work. People volunteer to do stuff and get paid for that.

That is a bit like Python but definitely different to languages like Java, C or even JavaScript.

So getting a stronger organizational background for PHP along with a more structured approach to infrastructure is definitely a good idea. But that is not the question that was asked by Larry.

Cheers

Andreas

--
                                                              ,,,
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| Andreas Heigl                                                       |
| mailto:andr...@heigl.org                  N 50°22'59.5" E 08°23'58" |
| https://andreas.heigl.org                                           |
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| https://hei.gl/appointmentwithandreas                               |
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| GPG-Key: https://hei.gl/keyandreasheiglorg                          |
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