Re: Re: PHP6's future

On 18.11.2009, at 02:24, Greg Beaver wrote: > What needs to happen is for developers to focus on finding problems > highlighted by failing .phpt tests. The most complex extension that > needs some loving is the SPL extension. I would hazard a guess that if > these .phpt tests are fixed, a large number of roadblocks will disappear. AFAIK PDO is also in a very broken state, though independently of PHP6 I am currently hoping to revitalize PDO development, which might also lead to building up the necessary resources/skills to get HEAD fixed up too. Anyways, to me it boils down to 2-3 people really putting in lots of time to move things forward and to build up momentum again. We all know how it feels to add stuff onto something that is fairly broken and who's future is not yet certain. We all hate wasting time, so those 2-3 people will mostly reassure that time spend on HEAD is not wasted. In this light when I last brought up this topic. Not sure if on IRC or the mailinglist it turned out that 3 different approaches were seen by people. Again who ever takes the helm on this will hopefully realign the community behind just one: 1) similar to Kalle's suggestion, clean up HEAD 2) make HEAD a proof of concept branch, turn 5_3 into HEAD, reimplement just the features we in the end found useful from HEAD 3) make HEAD a proof of concept branch, turn 5_3 into HEAD, implement a string class (both a unicode and a non unicode version) along the lines of the intl extension to bring unicode functionality to PHP but in a way that lets people easily switch between unicode aware strings. I think I remember that 2) got the least support. Ilia was the main one argueing in favor of 3) and Derick was very much pro 1). I am putting this out there not because I am looking forward to a lengthy discussion on this, but more because I feel that who ever takes on this task should know that there are different opinions on how to best proceed. In the end however I think that who ever does the work will probably get the biggest say in how things play out .. regards, Lukas Kahwe Smith mls@pooteeweet.org