On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 2:45 AM, Rasmus Lerdorf <ras...@lerdorf.com> wrote:
> > The roadmap is in the form of a feature list which you can find at > <http://wiki.php.net/etc>wiki.php.net/etc > There is never going to be complete agreement on any feature, but once > there is enough agreement from the main stakeholders in a certain feature > and the implementation looks feasible both from a technical perspective and > from actually having someone willing to do the work, it gets assigned to a > release. > The link doesn't work, but I'm assuming it is this one?: https://wiki.php.net/todo > In the case of annotations there were some serious stakeholders, like > Matthew, Sebastian and others who really do understand what annotations are > and why they are needed, but they did not agree with the proposed approach. > That's why we have the RFCs and that's why these discussions flare up around > release time. It triggers people to take a really serious look at a feature > to see how it would work for them. > In other words, the ideal situation to move this particular case forward is to have more stakeholders join the discussion, right?. An issue that I see here is that it is not that easy to join in the discussion because: a) They would need to be already in the list to have an easy way to access all the messages b) The "thread" is too disperse to follow in http://news.php.net/php.internals/ c) The public mirror of the newsgroup is faulty, see http://news.php.net/php.internals/52242 for example *command too long: XPATH <4dc826b1.4090...@lerdorf.com> < 4dc82a36.8090...@lerdorf.com> <4dc83401.2090...@sugarcrm.com>< 4dc8d122.3050...@lsces.co.uk> <4dc8f125.2010...@toolpark.com> < 4dc8fb1a.7040...@lerdorf.com>* My suggestion for this —and it would be a rather disruptive one, I know— is to move the lists to Google Groups, or at least create one or two as an experiment, say: php-userland and php-dev. BTW, Guilherme is an important stakeholder too, he has participated in Doctrine2 annotation-related work: https://github.com/doctrine/doctrine2/blob/master/lib/Doctrine/ORM/Mapping/Driver/AnnotationDriver.php > And yes there is a lot of noise. You will see quite a few uninformed > opinions, and a few informed ones. We have always kept things completely > open for anyone to have their say. This openness gives people access, but it > also often gives people the sense that there is complete chaos. We are not > .Net. > That I understand, respect and applaud. Still, I think a better process would provide more transparency (openness !== transparency), which is an issue I've seen others complain about. This way, people willing to implement their own feature might understand easier that if they help out with existing actionable PHP problems, the community could shift more easily their attention to their proposals. The way I see it, PHP has moved by inertia all these years, and it has worked, but I think there are measures that could be taken to lead the discussions towards a more productive path. For example, is there anyone at all that does some kind of moderation?, and I don't mean the coercive type, but the "hey guys, this seems off-topic, can you start this discussion on another email thread?" type of moderation. Best regards, David Vega
