On 07/04/2024 11:07, Rowan Tommins [IMSoP] wrote:
On 7 April 2024 01:32:29 BST, Jordan LeDoux<jordan.led...@gmail.com> wrote:
Internals is just volunteers. The people working on BCMath are doing that
because they want to, the people working on scalar decimal stuff are doing
that because they want to, and there's no project planning to tell one
group to stop. That's not how internals works (to the extent it works).
I kind of disagree. You're absolutely right the detailed effort is almost
always put in by people working on things that interest them, and I want to
make clear up front that I'm extremely grateful to the amount of effort people
do volunteer, given how few are paid to work on any of this.
However, the goal of the Internals community as a whole is to choose what
changes to make to a language which is used by millions of people. That
absolutely involves project planning, because there isn't a marketplace of PHP
forks with different competing features, and once a feature is added it's very
hard to remove it or change its design.
If - and I stress I'm not saying this is true - IF these two features have such
an overlap that we would only want to release one, then we shouldn't just
accept whichever is ready first, we should choose which is the better solution
overall. And if that was the case, why would we wait for a polished
implementation of both, then tell one group of volunteers that all their hard
work had been a waste of time?
So I think the question is very valid: do these two features have distinct use
cases, such that even if we had one, we would still want to spend time on the
other? Or, should we decide a strategy for both groups to work together towards
a single goal?
That's not about "telling one group to stop", it's about working together for
the benefit of both users and the people volunteering their effort, to whom I am
extremely grateful.
Yes, I was going to say the same thing as Rowan. But also Jordan has
shown that there's at least one advantage to each proposal - one would
be much more performant, one would might be releasable a lot sooner.
That's a possible reason to keep both.
