Re: Re: cvs: php4 /ext/sablot php_sablot.h

At 16:43 12-08-01, Stig Sæther Bakken wrote:

[Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com>] Guys, It's really simple, even trivial soft-dev issue, which is discussed in a completely broken manner, because you pour politics into the picture. But Zeev, as much as it sucks, there _is_ politics in the picture, and there has always been, especially in PHP 4.

It's really what you make of it. I don't see any good reasons for the amount of politics that was poured into PHP, and I think that none of the fears which were planted in people's hearts in the last couple of years was justified. As I said earlier, I think most people don't really care about this sort of stuff. Those who do, I believe, care mostly due to threads started by the same small group of people. I think that politics can (almost) disappear from PHP if these threads simply ceased to exist.

Some people are uncomfortable with the control Zend Inc. has on the core of PHP. I don't know if that is what you think is childish, but I certainly don't. With the current state of the Internet economy in mind, I think people have a right to be a bit paranoid.

It's Ltd, not Inc :) At any rate, whatever 'control' we have over the core of PHP is technological, not by virtue of licenses nor politics. Large portions of the core of PHP were written by Andi and me (SAPI, Windows port, output abstraction, etc. etc.) outside the scope of the engine. It just so happens that we work full-time on PHP related things. Sure, some of them go to proprietary Zend software, but we spend a huge amount of our time (I'd even say most) developing PHP itself. In the last year or so, my work has mostly been in the PHP core outside the engine.

To speak for myself, I have two problems with the whole "Zend versus PHP" problem: * It causes a lot of unnecessary arguing and bickering on the mailing list (like this message), which in the end becomes discouraging for everyone. The result: "F* it, I'm sick of silly PHP politics, I'm switching to Foo."

I don't think that this happens too often - I think that comments like Sebastian's are much more likely, which are more like "F* it, shut the hell up.". At any rate, it would stop only if politics went away, and decisions were made for technical reasons again.

* The design of the language is basically run by two people, whom I suspect don't program much with PHP themselves anymore. If this assumption is true, there is a lot of valuable "hands on user experiences" missing from the language design process.

As much as people portray it differently, as Andi said, this probably has nothing (or every little) to do with the political issues. It has to do with what people do and are interested in. As for whether or not we're making informed & good decisions, I believe that we are. The reason for that is simple - PHP's success made a quantum leap with release 3, and was further improved with release 4. It's true that we don't spend a large portion of our time writing PHP scripts, but we do spend a large portion of our time talking to people who develop in PHP - in all ranges, from simple scripts to huge sites. Do we have a strong saying on what goes into the core and what doesn't? We do, and I think that the success of PHP is a good indicator that we're been doing a good job. This doesn't come to say that others in the PHP project weren't doing a good job, e.g. the module developers, documentation team, QA team, etc.; However, if the infrastructure wasn't doing well, PHP would have died, or lingered, or stepped back - and in reality, it's doing quite the opposite. Zeev