At 13:43 15-08-01, Sebastian Bergmann wrote:
>Jani Taskinen wrote:
> > Can you guys give up these childish fights and just code?
>
> These are not childish fights.
Yes they are. They are on childish topics, lead nowhere and consume lots
of our time.
> And I assume there are some people
> out there, just like Sascha and Thies, who are waiting to code
> and contribute the Zend Engine, once the license gets changed.
You have absolutely no reason to assume that this is the case, except for
the license noise that was spawned by the same people who spawn these
pointless threads on php-dev. I believe Hartmut will help documenting the
API, but that's about it.
> But chaning the license is only one step that Andi and Zeev need
> to take, IMHO.
>
> A second one would be documenting the Zend Engine's internals.
> And this can only be done properly by Andi and Zeev, since they
> planned and coded it.
> Looking at zend_compile.c and zend_execute.c today just gives me
> the creeps, from a software developer's view: nearly no
> comments.
> Of course, I can guess what is done where, since I know a bit on
> compiler theory. But with a proper documentation, people like
> Sascha and Thies could start with their work on the engine right
> away -- without learning (by guessing) how the Zend Engine
> actually does what it does.
>
> While the Zend API could easily be documented, or updated from
> what's in ZendAPI on cvs.zend.com, from any developer who wrote
> some PHP extensions, the documentation of the Zend Engine itself
> and its internals can IMHO only be done by its creators.
With all due respect, 'you get what you pay for' works as far as
documentation goes in open source. Fact is, we don't *need* to do
*anything*. Nobody in an opensource project does. What we do we do
because it's fun (which these threads do a good job of ruining) and because
it's interesting. Not because we have to do it.
I never liked writing documentation. I don't think that developers in most
other opensource projects are significantly different, neither are most of
the other developers in the PHP circle (it's not as if the rest of PHP is
too documented... Where are the SAPI docs, or the fopen wrappers docs, or
the session docs?). Try to understand the Perl source code, for
example. For me, things work just fine the way they are, and I'm not
searching for extra stuff to do. If somebody finds the entry level too
steep to contribute to the engine, by all means, either try to document it,
or go away. Don't say that I *have* to do it, because I don't.
Sorry for the somewhat aggressive tone, but it's kind of annoying to see
people demanding things from you, when you're a volunteer.
Zeev
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