Re: Re: note 69872 rejected and deleted from language.types.array by notes editor bjori

Hi Marcus On 9/25/06, Marcus Bointon <marcus@synchromedia.co.uk> wrote:

On 25 Sep 2006, at 17:50, Hannes Magnusson wrote: I'll speak even slower: r e a d t h e g u i d e l i n e s o n h o w t o r e p o r t a d o c b u g. Last time I looked doc and code bugs were all in one system. My They are in one system, but spread out over few mailing lists.

You have to understand that PHP is not a one mans job. There are hundreds involved helping in every way they possibly can. There is no reason for those who work on the documentation to read every single website, pecl, internals, mirror, system (and so on and on and on) bug report so it is really important for the bug reporter to pick the correct category and describe the problem as well as he can. Heck, even the version you enter in the bug report is important as some focus on documenting new features rather than editoring old docs. Reporting a bug is a responsibility. Its not about dumping the problem over to someone else.

impression of the problem was that the behaviour was wrong and the docs were right, because what it does is certainly quite unexpected. The simple problem that led me to track this down was that I had an object property that seemed to vanish after casting to an array. Calling the bug bogus didn't make any sense at all - either PHP or the docs had to be wrong, and marking it as bogus just says "There is no problem". It seems like I guessed wrong on the bug category, but that doesn't make the report bogus. A more appropriate course of action would have been to change the category to a documentation

That very well could be, we are no robots. We all make mistakes.

problem. Requiring a reporter to know WHY a bug occurs is just obtuse - a bug report is typically only an observation that a problem exists, hopefully with some accuracy regarding when.

We _need_ every help we can get and we _expect_ you to fill out the reports as well as humanly possible - and answer as well as humanly possible when asked for more info.

If the docs are _wrong_ don't you think they should be changed? It would help way more people to fix the docs rather then submitting note arguing with the manual. That will only confuse people. I wasn't arguing with the manual! Quite the opposite in fact - The function I posted acts like the docs said PHP should! Given that my bug report was bogused, posting a workaround for PHP's apparently incorrect behaviour seemed like a perfectly reasonable course of

I do understand your reasons, but your report was bogus because it claimed this was a PHP bug. You _knowing_ the docs are wrong could have reclassified the report (and re-opened it), politely, with a suggested change - and even phpdoc patch if you were in a good mood (we _love_ patches).

action, especially given that there was no other source for this information. What's more, now I hear that the documentation has been updated (thank you), the function is still useful as it saves having

aaah. Hold your horses fella. It hasn't been, yet. A proposed patch has been sent, not committed, yet.

to figure out how to parse out the additional information it includes. And if you can, we would _love_ a patch against phpdoc (since this is community driven effort after all) correcting this issue. I would have been more than happy to do that. The only problem in this case is that the cause of the problem was not made apparent until after the report was bogused, so I was not in any position to suggest a fix. (As a side note: how do you like the comments currently on that page? I at least am not going to read them all) One minor idea that might help with this - implement digg-style thumbs-up/down, and possibly 'report as obsolete/inaccurate/ miscategorised/inappropriate' so that comments can get rated and editors can find out which ones are of lesser interest without having to read them all. If digg is anything to go by, people just like clicking stuff.

I think the idea itself is quite good. But god, ouh god. That would multiply the note editors job by zillion. Currently all submitted note get sent to a mailing list (the one we are having this discussion) so every note (in theory) is read by "our staff" - but there aren't many people willing to read every single note submitted into the manual deciding which one should stay and which not. You can just imagine the time going into this - and spending even more time on "why the fuck did you delete my note you stupid peace of shit?!?!" mails (yes, we do get these kind of responses)... Not my preferred job. Why do we then do it? We want to help out the project - in every way we possibly can. If it means taking shit from angry users, so be it.

Thank you for your attention, and for fixing the docs. I've amended my original bug report to reflect this information. The funny thing about that you closed it..

Marcus PS: someone with appropriate karma, please feel free to trash this comment of mine: https://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php? action=delete+68828 as it's got errors in. Done

Hope my reply made some sense to you. -Hannes