hi Florin, On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 12:44 PM, Florin Patan <florinpa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This morning I read something that's not fun: > https://twitter.com/ircmaxell/status/376027280562073600 > > Yet another good contributor leaves this community (not the whole PHP > community) because of the way things are done here. For what Anthony said he did not leave. > It's true that this is an open source project and everyone can join > and leave whenever he/she wants but like Anthony says, this project > needs more leadership, more vision and definitely a better management. > Someone said that there's no one coming forward or trying to change > things, I may not be the right person to do this but at least maybe > I'll wake up someone who can take action and change things. > > Here's some facts: > - a couple of months ago named parameters was a taboo subject, I know > because I've asked for it and everyone went silent, now we have a RFC > discussing it > - we had a RFC for autoloading functions but people just can't > understand how to provide feedback and at the end of the day it > resulted in a contributor leaving because of the murkiness here I do not agree here. I read and re read this thread again and all I can see is one developer trying to get and provide all information to make an informed decision. The mistake was to discuss in a circular way for way too long. I, for one. should have interrupted this discussion, post my thoughts or opinion as well and ask to update the RFC accordingly. > - we have a bunch of RFCs waiting for feedback and being trolled to > infinity by people with their own agendas There are controversial RFCs, why we need to discussions, drafts, etc. before voting. But we suffer from the circular discussions problem way too often. I can take part of the blame as I did not participate nor followed enough discussions to avoid this problem. > - having a RFC to make a language change requires to have a patch > which if you don't know C and internals you got no chance of doing. Well, I cannot help here. Unless I have time and needs for the given RFC. That's how things work in 99.999% of all OSS projects I contribute to. It is by no mean a way to block something, but simply a fact that we have to live with. > And if you do know C, PHP internals will drain the soul out of you > before doing something We have to improve that, not sure how right now but have some ideas (RFCs, voting process, release process goals were to solve this exact problem or part of it). > - there's no clear objective for what PHP has / will have / will not > have / will not ever have. true, I don't think it will ever have a master plan. > - there were patches proposed by Facebook, and others, that are / were > rejected, delayed or ignored. Who heard of Facebook anyway, they have > just one website with a billion users probably running on a a couple > of Galaxy Note 3 and 2-3 iPhone 6 as a load balancers, my cat can do > better I tell you. Which patch from Facebook have been ignored or rejected? I can't remember any of them. That being said, I really do not think a patch is better or should be accepted because <big company XYZ> proposes it. Facebook is huge but their needs barely matches the needs of our users. Tey do have great ideas, but they have to propose them like any other contributors. > Then there's that 'little' community of framework developers called > FIG which tried to do some standardization in the way things are done > in userland but guess what. It took 2 years or so for anyone here to > actually think we might really want to add PSR-0 to core. And people > here still have issues with that because it's not in the PHP 'open > spirit' (of the internals). Granted, FIG could do much better but hey, > they follow the example set here by you. There was a RFC (autoloaded thing if I remember correctly), it got rejected. We must accepted this decision. Not happy with our choice? Well, back to the roots, be a contributor and you can vote. I know it sounds weird to point it this way, but at the end of day this is how we can change PHP. > For me this PHP 'open spirit' is just a way of saying: I don't want to > have my head full of real issues so I'll just ignore them and let > others handle them. Not for me. But I do not participate in discussions where I have no clue or don't see what to discuss but say yes or no. I then simply wait for the votes. > Look at other languages. Take GO for example, which is done by the > other big noobs on the market called Google. > > If you want, you can actually start and contribute to the language in > less that a week from learning the language! I gave many talks about php, how to contribute, etc. My personal record is 4 new contributions during my talk (less than 45 minutes). To contribute does not mean you have to know C, there are many other ways, many of them do not even involve internals discussions. > > And I know what you'll say: > - yet another one making some smoke, lets ignore him; I do not consider what you say as "smoke", but the tone is not the one I would have used, not while trying to solve a "tone" problem on this list, in my humble opinion. > - who cares about you complaining, PHP is still the most spread > language for servers Right, but I do care about complains, as long as they are actually valid and constructive. > - PHP releases very often with new things for developers that they > want / use / need. Indeed, and recent huge changes in how we work allow that. is it bad? > But you really expect this to continue forever? If so you are plain > ignorant and you shouldn't be part of this. No, but what do you actually propose? > > So, either you care about PHP and wake up or leave and let others take over. No thanks, I won't leave. But again, what is your solution? > > Or better yet, ask someone like Facebook to take over and that's it. > Maybe they'll be interested in doing that since they had to rewrite > HHVM two times to get more performance out of PHP. Over my dead body. The day a commercial company actually own PHP, I will leave, without any delay. > If you don't like Facebook, let Microsoft take over if they are > interested. They have contributors here, they have some programming > languages under their belt. Be sure I will ask them this week, it happens I'm at their HQ these days ;-) > But please, stop with these: > - nah, today is not a good day for this patch/ thread > - we have a leader already > - we have people contributing We do. Maybe we need even more to create a balance. I would also suggest you to look at the NEWS file or release notes for the 5.4 and 5.5. Almost all major new features have been done by new contributors! If that's not a sign that things have change, even only a little bit, then I have no idea what I am doing here. > - look ma' charts are growing, we are still ahead of others > - I'll just be against everything today as I didn't had enough sugar > in my coffee > attitudes as it's really not productive for developers and companies > that are still using PHP. As I agree on many of the points in this post, I can't and never will agree on his tone. This is exactly what creates issues with new contributors, or between core developers. Cheers, -- Pierre @pierrejoye | http://www.libgd.org -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
