Re: PHP vs. Zend paranoia?

I don't really want to get into a whole argument so I'll just give you short to the point answers. At 11:47 AM 8/10/2001 -0700, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

Paranoia or not. PHP needs extensions and PHP needs an enthusiastic crowd of developers willing to write such extensions. As it is today, we do not have a well-documented API for writing such extensions. People have to muddle along looking at existing code. Outside of the extension API, PHP is one of the best-documented open source projects out there because of a very studious documentation team. Now, why don't we have a well-documented extension API? When the Zend API was initially documented and put up on Zend's web site, I asked if it couldn't be put up on php.net? I don't recall what the reply was, but it never did happen. And I don't see any sort of improvement happening in the state of that documentation. It hasn't changed much since the initial release and as such it is completely out of date today.

The Zend API docs on Zend.com where written as part of a book and Zend Tech. asked the book company to put it under the open documentation license so that not only people who buy the book can benefit from it. The API docs are in a CVS where anyone can access them and they can be posted on php.net and anywhere else on the net. There is no restriction. What do you mean "it never did happen"? You are welcome (and always have been welcome) to checkout the CVS and create a version for php.net. I don't see why I should have done it. I invited a few months ago anyone who wants to checkout the CVS tree and work on it to do so from cvs.zend.com directory ZendAPI. I actually think someone even at the time commited some style sheets which would suite php.net but I'm not quite sure.

You may call it political, but people flock to contribute to PHP whereas I don't see people flocking to contribute to Zend Technologies Inc. Probably precisely because they see it as more of a company than an open source project. It is the same "unfair perception", as I think you called it, issue that people have with the license of the engine itself. But if that perception is keeping us from growing and improving because people shy away from contributing due to a perception (even if it is unfair) that their work is going directly to benefit a commercial organization, then we all lose in the end. PHP needs Zend, obviously, but Zend certainly also needs PHP. This relationship goes both ways and it needs to be carefully cultivated.

You know better than anyone else that even in PHP 3 which featured a scripting engine Zeev and I wrote (which had nothing to do with Zend Tech) there still were barely any people who contributed to the scripting engine itself. This is because there isn't that much work to be done there and most people are mainly interested in writing PHP extensions for technologies they need. This had nothing to do with licensing back then. You are welcome to check out the PHP 3 CVS history and see for yourself but I know you don't have to do so because you remember this as well as I do. It's just a nice excuse.

Let's come up with a decent solution to this that is as maintenance-free as possible. I will personally commit to doing whatever onoing maintenance work it may end up causing. Technically it shouldn't be all that hard to build a set of macros that let an extension look and feel like a PHP extension and still build as a standalone Zend extension.

As I mentioned in an earlier Email I really don't think it's such a big deal. I'd just like to think of a way which saves us from duplicating code. In the end, the maintenance work usually falls on Zeev and myself when it comes to these kind of problems even with your "personal commitment". So let's find a way which makes everyone happy *and* leads to an easily maintainable source tree. Zeev made the change not in order to have another "zend" string in 4 more places but because he truly believes (and from a technical aspect I agree with him) that it doesn't make sense to duplicate code from Zend to PHP. Ultimately this could lead to weird behavior which we would then have to debug and fix. But as I said, I'm all in favor to find a decent solution which will stop you from exploiting this issue as an excuse to bicker. Andi