5.3 Release Planning

Hi all, recently there were quite a few proposals about stuff for 5.3. If we implement them all we won't finish in a "soonish" time and we get new ideas postponing the 5.3 release therefore the following: - Scanner based on re2c: Going to re2c promises to make maintenance simpler and increase the parsers performance. Currently the prototype does not provide support for Zend multibyte mode. This seems doable within April. Hence I ask for finishing by end of April the latest. Once that is done we will go over to a freeze and switch to bug fixing only mode. If this is done sooner than we'll freeze sooner, too. If there are delays we'll freeze anyways and use the scanner for a later release. - bundling pecl/intl According to Stas it's ready for being bundled and was voted in. The only question I see there is the "how to bundle it". There we should definitely find a better thing than symlinking around on the CVS server, an option might be to to switch to subversion and use svn:externals or keeping stuff in pecl and then having some scripts (maybe part of buildconf/the release scripts) fetching them into a checkout. Just ideas ... For the moment symlinking might be the best. - bundling pecl/phar Lots of work has been done there, I'd like to have it in, general PECL discussion: See above. - Large File Support That's a thing on the todo for ages. A patch was proposed by Wez once[1]. The patch should be, according to Wez, improved to use php_config.h for the defines instead of passing them using CFLAGS. Additionally one should mind Joe's comments[2] in that old thread. If somebody has time I'd welcome it, if not: It waited for so long already so it might wait a bit more. ;-) [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg31117 [2] http://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg31124 - All the other stuff Extension maintainers always like improving their extensions, There will be improvements to GD I think and other stuff, I don't list that all - the timeline is mentioned above. - Fixes&Testing Test snaps, report bugs, fix bugs, ... That's the most important thing. That's where really everybody reading this can contribute and do important things. :-) You might miss some stuff in the list above, at first one might think about these: - Traits: Interesting concept, basically most of us want it, some decision about some details needed, then some implementation, i had a short discussion with Stefan and we agreed that we don't call it "release critical" for 5.3 and plan 5.3 without traits. - Closures/Anonymous functions: Basically the same as with traits, some detail discussions left, then a bit time for updating the patches, not planned for 5.3. Surrounding all this stuff we'd also have another topic we should start working on: Updating guide, something like README.UPDATE_5_2. I think our new wiki might be a good place to create such a list. I'll find some place there and come than back to the list, but you might already start thinking about stuff you know that should be mentioned there. That's again a thing everybody can contribute. That's enough for the moment, johannes PHP 5.3 RM