RE: [PHP-DEV] RFC: Move phpng to master

On Mon, 21 Jul 2014, Zeev Suraski wrote: > From: Andrea Faulds [mailto:ajf@ajf.me] > > > > We *could* make PHP NEXT in a year, sure, but it won't be worthwhile > > being called PHP NEXT. > > Everything I know about the PHP community, combined with the amazing > level of interest that the recent PHPNG benchmarks garnered, tells me > that it wrong. > People would love to get it even if it was just the performance & > memory footprint gains alone. And we're not even talking about that - > we'd still have ample time to put in additional features into it. > > > There are a lot of big changes we can and should make and that would > > necessitate delaying it. Three years might be a bit long. > > Three years is a lifetime in our world of software... > > > However, I am confident that we need more than a year to make this > > major worth it. > > Even if it's going to be 18 months (which is on the upper limit of > what I think we should allow for .NEXT), I don't see a need for 5.7 in > between. When we created the release process RFC, from the get go, I > thought that releasing every 12 months is too frequent. I was told > not to worry and that we'll "see how it goes" and "change if we need > to". Now, suddenly this became a God-given commandment, that we must > have a mini version every year and on time - and it's not. Reality is > that the userbase is embracing versions a lot slower than we crank > them up - releasing 5.7 to be followed shortly by 6/7 doesn't make a > lot of sense, I think. > > Still, I think we're much better off delivering .NEXT as soon as we > can as. I think that's the cru - and very important. I would totally be in favour with PHP 7 be "just" PHPNG - as long of course it's finished. Whether this takes slightly more than a year, I don't really care. > > > This is the assumption we should take IMHO, and only branch 5.7 > > > (and more importantly, invest time in it) if it proves wrong. > > > > Branching 5.7 wouldn't be a big effort. Master is fairly stable, and > > if some RFCs pass, we can merge them into 5.7. It also gives us a > > fallback. If PHP NEXT doesn't happen next year (and I expect that it > > won't), we'll still have 5.7. > > I can live with that, as long as we treat 5.7 as a secondary project > where we backport stuff rom master, and as long as it's clear to > everyone that it may be (or IMHO may very well be) throw-away code > that we'll never actually use. Personally I think it makes more sense > to focus on getting .NEXT out the door quickly so that we don't have > to get into the headache of working on two active trees, though. I'd > like to see what others are thinking... I agree. We should not focus on two active trees. cheers, Derick