Voting karma (Was: Re: [PHP-DEV] [VOTE] 64 bit platform improvements for string length and integer)

On 31 January 2014 13:21, Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> wrote: > I have to add something here. > > Many of the people voting on that RFC have never ever contributed as much as > a single line of code into the PHP source tree, and a couple have literally > contributed low-single-digit patches. > Incidentally, as far as I could tell, all of them[*] voted in favor of the > proposed changes (i.e. source compatibility breakage). > > Even though having non-code-contributors makes a lot of sense for decisions > regarding the language's features and we built in support for it in the > voting RFC, in my opinion, it makes no sense at all for people who have no > stake at the development of the language's source code to weigh in on how > that code is written. Personally I didn't expect we'd be voting on things > like that (implementation style) back when I was involved in the voting RFC, > but perhaps it's time to amend it a bit. I've said this before on IRC, but I'll say it here too: I'd like to go a step further than that and tie voting in general to karma. (I'd even go another step and say "karma + making active contributions in the last year", but that might be too open to gaming.) In that case, the only votes that would count for the int size RFC would be people with Zend karma. The idea of giving the non-Internals community a voice is a good one, but I don't think the haphazard way we're doing it now benefits anyone, and this situation has been brewing for a while: a change that is a worthwhile one on the surface, but which the majority of developers who actually have to maintain the code don't want. We've probably been lucky to make it this far without it happening. We need a better way of determining quality than "everyone with a VCS account for anything on git.php.net or svn.php.netgets a vote", to put it bluntly. Adam