Re: PHP vs. Zend paranoia?

On Sat, 11 Aug 2001, Andi Gutmans wrote: > 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release and as such it is completely out of date today.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. > Guys -- the tone is getting really nasty here, can we just stop? I just want to code. I really think there should be a seperate mailing list at least, perhaps, beastwars@lists.php.net, I've really had enough of this back and forth crap, the relationship between PHP & Zend is beginning to parallel the one of an old married couple. -Sterling