php-windows Digest 28 Oct 2009 09:54:35 -0000 Issue 3718
Topics (messages 29680 through 29683):
Re: Zend Server Community Edition
29680 by: Pierre Joye
29681 by: Stanislav Malyshev
29682 by: Pierre Joye
29683 by: Shahar Evron
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--- Begin Message ---
hi,
The only fact that you build 5.2 with VC8 means that you apply patches
not present in php 5.2 (eventually in 5.3).
About moving to VC9 for 5.3, given that we have moved to VC9 and
everything is going well so far, that sounds like a logical move.
But why would you provide your own binaries with random patches (not a
judgement, only a statement) instead of using PHP binaries? Security?
We do security releases when a librarie is affected. PHP itself has
regular security releases as well. For example, Microsoft uses
php.net's binaries for the Web Platform Installer
(http://www.microsoft.com/web/).
Other comments inline,
On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 5:51 PM, Shahar Evron <[email protected]> wrote:
> 2. Patches that provide Zend Server specific functionality, such as
> fixes that help our own specific FastCGI infrastructure to work better.
> This is done in a very local and minimal manner, and shouldn't affect
> the behavior of your own PHP code.
Your own FastCGI to work better than what?
> Again, I think the only concern here for you as an end user (and not a
> core PHP developer) is the fact that bugs reported through bugs.php.net
> might not be accepted. Again, I have no say to whether this is right or
> wrong, I am not a core developer and can't judge. As I said you can
> always report these bugs to Zend, we can triage and figure out if it's a
> PHP bug or a Zend induced bug, and fix accordingly (and push to php.net
> if relevant).
As being both my concerns are to actually see a kind of fork of PHP,
being presented as the only usable binary distributions for windows
and other platforms (and for apache too).
As with any distributors who apply custom patches, we do not support
them. However these distributors usually have an issues tracker and
ask their users to report issues there. If they meet a real php bug,
it is then then reported in our tracker. That's common practice. We
will indeed not reject obvious bugs only because the users use ZS.
Cheers,
--
Pierre
http://blog.thepimp.net | http://www.libgd.org
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
Hi!
As being both my concerns are to actually see a kind of fork of PHP,
being presented as the only usable binary distributions for windows
and other platforms (and for apache too).
There's no any "fork" and nobody ever presented it as "the only usable
binary distributions for windows".
Applying patches between releases is how most of binary distros always
worked (provided there are patches important for their clients which are
not released yet) with a lot of opensource projects - incl. Redhat, etc.
- and nobody ever thought of talking about "forking" anything.
--
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
[email protected] http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829 MSN: [email protected]
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 8:46 PM, Stanislav Malyshev <[email protected]> wrote:
> There's no any "fork" and nobody ever presented it as "the only usable
> binary distributions for windows".
> Applying patches between releases is how most of binary distros always
> worked (provided there are patches important for their clients which are not
> released yet) with a lot of opensource projects - incl. Redhat, etc. - and
> nobody ever thought of talking about "forking" anything.
Call it a spoon if you prefer :)
Btw, that's why I used "a kinf of fork" as I'm not sure about the
other patches not fitting in the backporting category.
Cheers,
--
Pierre
http://blog.thepimp.net | http://www.libgd.org
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
Hi,
Pierre Joye wrote:
> hi,
>
> The only fact that you build 5.2 with VC8 means that you apply patches
> not present in php 5.2 (eventually in 5.3).
Yes, that's true. I include those in the 2nd category of patches we
apply. They should have no effect on any user code.
I am specifically trying to focus on real pros and cons of Zend Server
for the end user, not for someone who's a core developer. These patches
99.9% of the time have either no effect on the user's code, or, if they
do, it's for the better because it is some bug fix.
> But why would you provide your own binaries with random patches (not a
> judgement, only a statement) instead of using PHP binaries? Security?
> We do security releases when a librarie is affected. PHP itself has
> regular security releases as well. For example, Microsoft uses
> php.net's binaries for the Web Platform Installer
> (http://www.microsoft.com/web/).
First, they are not random. Usually they are very specific hand picked
patches that we decide are important enough for our own customers.
There's nothing random about it.
BTW in most cases these patches are created by Zend employees who fix a
bug in PHP specifically because it is important to our customers, commit
it, and we then provide an update.
Now as for the "why" question, A part of Zend's business is to provide a
binary distibution of PHP which is supported and updated by Zend. We
need to control patches that go in, libraries that we compile against
etc. - exactly because while PHP releases do include critical fixes,
sometimes our own customers need a fix that PHP developers do not
consider important enough to release (not criticizing, different users
have different needs). It happens on almost every release of Zend
Server. This is exactly what our customers pay us for.
In reality I think that this practice is not very different from how
Linux distributions might patch and release some software before there's
an upstream release. It happens all the time (and again, this is why
some people choose to pay RHEL or Ubuntu).
In fact, they do that for PHP as well - so I am not sure why this is so
different.
> As being both my concerns are to actually see a kind of fork of PHP,
> being presented as the only usable binary distributions for windows
> and other platforms (and for apache too).
We do not present it as such (see first paragraph of my first email in
this thread - I specifically say the same setup can be achieved in other
ways). We do think it's better than some setups, it would be silly of us
not to take pride in what we do - but I don't think we've said it's the
only usable way to use PHP on Windows. If you encountered someone from
Zend saying that I'd like to know, so I can correct them.
Most importantly, it is *not* a fork of PHP. PHP is open source, vendors
are free to build binary distributions of it. We have no intentions to
start taking development in a different direction. Again, I think it is
like saying Debian forks PHP, or most other software they ship. It's
just wrong.
Actually, forking PHP makes absolutely no business sense for Zend as a
company. Seriously, think about it. More work for us, less value to our
users, more compatibility headaches - we are trying to minimize those,
not the opposite.
> As with any distributors who apply custom patches, we do not support
> them. However these distributors usually have an issues tracker and
> ask their users to report issues there. If they meet a real php bug,
> it is then then reported in our tracker. That's common practice. We
> will indeed not reject obvious bugs only because the users use ZS.
We have a ticketing system and forums, and we have in house developers
who can take a bug reported to Zend and work to either fix it or
properly report it in bugs.php.net.
Do you think an open bug tracker for ZS would make a big difference for
your work?
Thanks,
Shahar.
--
Shahar Evron <[email protected]>
Product Manager
Zend Technologies
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