Re: We Want Quality

> > Please keep an open mind. These are general guidelines. > > I am; Your strict instructions were the ones who seemed not to leave any > room for an open mind (they pretty sound like army-style orders, to be > honest :). "Omit needless word!" cried Professor Will Strunk. The so-called Little Book (The Elements of Style) gives useful guidelines for writing. > As a general guideline, testing before releasing is always a > good idea, and we employ this strategy, better or worse, since the dawn of > PHP 4.0, and even earlier. Nonetheless, we have to face the fact that we > don't have a QA team, and that we rely completely on user feedback, and on > developers' response to this feedback. The DISCARD_PATH issue may be a > great example of how we, as developers, can fuck up; Unfortunately there's > no bulletproof way to prevent that from happening in the future, except > for trying harder. Extending the release process to reach a larger audience will help. Reviving the php-beta list where people commit to test basic functionality on their platform is a good start. > > > This is completely unfeasible, and can definitely not live peacefully with > > > your previous suggestion. We can't halt development for 5 days, it'd > > > simply not work. > > > > Other projects can do it, so I don't see any reason why we > > cannot. You might want to elaborate on this point. > > I don't have anything to elaborate on; Considering the number of PHP code > contributors and the huge amount of different (and unrelated) pieces of > code, it's simply not feasible to ask everybody to stop their development > for a period of 1-2 weeks. I don't see it that way. The contributors are interested in improving PHP, not in destabilizing it. Closing the CVS tree for a week will not stop them from developing new stuff. It will only delay inclusion to the official PHP CVS tree. > Most projects I know have done this at one point or another, both > commercial and opensource (especially opensource). We did not invent the > notion of patch levels. > > I agree that generally, any different release should be labeled with a > different version and package name; I don't consider a 4.0.1pl1 released > shortly after 4.0.1 a catastrophy. > > As far as I recall, there was only one other case in which something > similar happened (I think it was even worse, something that caused gpc > being turned off to crash PHP), which was my fault. We released a > pl shortly afterwards, which solved the problem. I don't think that > it ended up being catastrophic either. Nonetheless, making changes in > central places a couple of hours before the release is indeed not a Good > Thing, and we should indeed try to avoid it as much as possible. Agreed. - Sascha