Re: PHP vs. Zend paranoia?

At 10:38 PM 8/11/2001 +0300, Alexander Bokovoy wrote:

On Sat, Aug 11, 2001 at 03:10:36AM +0300, Andi Gutmans wrote:

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 Andi, you may recall that there were attempts to contribute to the scripting engine for PHP3 in past two years but discussion itself quickly gets down. You may remember constant proposals from Midgard team for extending scripting engine in general way, there were even code patches sent to the Zend Tech. stuff and mailing list midgard-zend at Midgard's site. Result of these efforts was zero-sized though.

You are talking about contributions which meant changing PHP in a way which suited the Midgard project specifically. While there is nothing wrong with that we didn't think the patches were suitable. You actually sent us these patches back in the PHP 3 days and we rejected them because we didn't believe they should be in PHP 3 for technical reasons. I still believe your patches should not have been incorporated because I remember they were template patches and we believed in a direction more similar to Andrei's Smarty and not patching the scripting language itself with your templates. Sorry your proposal was not accepted but I still think it was the right thing to do. If you have any new ideas of features which you think should be added to PHP feel free to bring them up on the mailing list. We will take the proposal seriously. You have to understand that not every proposal gets accepted because if we'd accept every idea PHP would be bloated & slow, often the language syntax would be very confusing for PHP users and sometimes it just makes more sense to implement stuff in an external module. The main features we laid out for the Engine 2 are features which have come up on the PHP mailing lists time and time again. They were usually requested not by one person but by many over the years. One thing which came up after we listed the most requested features was that the PEAR guys desperately needed namespaces and we are going to try our best to implement it for them (not an easy task). Andi