Hi Den tir. 16. apr. 2019 kl. 20.38 skrev Jason Wharton <ja...@jwharton.com>: > > Kalle, > > I am not intimately aware of the details of how things have been maintained > in the past by Lester. But, it didn't sound to me as if Lester was patching > his own build of PHP or trying to take short-cuts in a bad way. He was > pointing out that the API for InterBase and Firebird have been very stable > for a long time and that the bulk of the efforts to keep the driver going > stems more from work required on the PHP side of things. This is natural > and to be expected, as I see it.
Lester has not maintained anything in the PHP project, I do not remember any patches from his side in my time within the project. Of course my memory is not perfect, no one is, the primary thing he has contributed in this debate after it was sparked by my RFC was noisy that made it hard to navigate the actual relevant discussions. As for whether the API is stable, that I cannot say, it might be, but if the extension is not actively maintained or has not been for a long time, it becomes unstable. Bug#72175 is a very good example to start understanding what I'm talking about, it spawned because no one abled (like mentioned in my RFC) was able to actually test it and work with it. We essentially ported the extension blindly, that is anything but stable, it is terrible and bad place for our millions of users that one extension is in this critical state of being unstable. To add further to this (as also pointed out in the RFC) is that it does illegal things for threaded mode of PHP (ZTS), this too is unacceptable when the extension claims to be threaded compatible. > In any case, there has been new activity this year with new people making > effort to address whatever issues need to be addressed. This is a fresh new > bud of growth, so to speak, that I would like to foster and encourage. > Please join me to also do so.H > > Whatever grievances the PHP-DEV team has with the etc/interbase driver, we > ask for an opportunity to have them enumerated so that we can assess our > capacity to address them. Keeping drivers up to date requires mutual > collaboration from both sides. There is wounds that needs to be healed combined with the lack of understanding of how the PHP project is managed that needs to be sorted as the very first. I have not gotten the impression by any of the emails I have gotten personally that leaves me with impression of this, and this thread is only a testament to this, but I do like to be wrong but it does not seem to be the case here. > So, while there are reasons to point the finger in our direction, lets get > it all out in the open. Then, lets do all we can on both sides to meet the > needs of our mutual customers in the most convenient manner possible for > them. Then I would look at PDO_Firebird as a first step, this extension can use a hand and there is still time for it to get major improvements before PHP 7.4 hits a feature freeze in the summer time this year. I think I have stated the rest of my thoughts in this email and the previous one I sent as a start. > For me, this is the bottom line. We at the Firebird Foundation are working > hard to raise revenue to fund the various objectives we see as viable. This > is an important objective for us, even if you have not seen reasons yet to > convince you of this. I'd like to keep our momentum moving forward and I > believe you could open doors and make a difference in this. Our doors are always open, however I will *not* stop the democratic vote that is currently on going when we got nothing to start building trust on, this is not the way that PHP as a project works, we have rules, guidelines and practices much like the Firebird project. While I do believe your words are honest and truthfully, I got nothing to build trust on, that trust was broken a long time ago and coming in the last moment does not help me believe that anything could happen when we have been burnt so many times in the past. I say that if there was any concrete evidence (in terms of patches) to show a willingness and to help justify the words that I would consider halting the vote, but none of that happened, leaving me with nothing to base a belief on. > Would you agree if things are done correctly that it is in everyone's best > interests to keep a solid and well-maintained driver for InterBase and > Firebird in the core? While I agree with this sentiment, I do not agree to stop the RFC because of this. I mentioned PDO_Firebird which is a PDO variant specifically for Firebird currently in the core, this extension will currently stay in php-src (as also noted in the RFC). I do not know or understand why you (you as in you as a person and as in the Firebird Foundation) seem to ignore the fact that it exists and only want to focus on ext/interbase. With all this being said; there is however one option in case the vote passes when it ends in about a weeks time. That is for the Firebird Foundation to take over control of the extension on PECL and work out its problems and re-propose it to be included back into php-src once it is in a mature state with the PHP RFC process. This means that it still has the possibility of being included in PHP8 which currently is looking to be released at the end of 2020. That leaves over a year to get familiar with how the PHP project works, our policies, community and guidelines. As a personal advice, I strongly advice to invest in the PDO_Firebird extension as PDO is considered the primary way forward for database access in PHP (Yes we have ext/pgsql, ext/mysqli, ext/sqlite and such but they are mature and stable and widely used). Start by making a plan and look at what the current PDO_Firebird driver offers and doesn't and post patches through Pull Requests and they will most likely be merged fairly quickly. However if nothing happens with the PDO_Firebird driver, then I could potentially seeing it joining PECL in the future as I'm unfamiliar its internals, but looking at the bugs reported[1], I can only start wondering. [1] https://bugs.php.net/search.php?cmd=display&bug_type=All&status=Open&package_name%5B%5D=PDO+Firebird&by=Any&limit=30 -- regards, Kalle Sommer Nielsen ka...@php.net -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
