I believe I may have found the source of the confusion around the purpose of
this group. In my eagerness to get things going, I misspoke in the writeup
below.
To paraphrase the goal of this group, we are saying "Hey, we are all
agreeing that we are going to code this way and we'd like you to do it to."
That should have read:
To paraphrase the goal of this group, we are saying "Hey, we are all
agreeing that we are going to code this way."
Furthermore, my comments in my conclusion were mine and mine alone. While I
would love to see the the standards agreed upon by this group be widely
adopted by the PHP community at large, that is not a goal of the group.
I apologize for the confusion I have created.
=C=
By way of a follow-on, I'd just like to state my own reasoning and perspective on why this group was formed, and to make a few observations.
Firstly, I think the reasoning behind each of us joining this group can be best expressed by what happened: as representatives of major PHP development projects, we came together of our own volition and put aside our differences, in order to do "the greatest good for the greatest number of people".
The point of coming together on the standards which we agreed to was to provide our collective user community with some semblance of interoperability between our projects, and provide a way forward for other projects who'd like to interoperate with ours as well.
We also hoped, maybe in vain, that might would follow our example, and we actually might find something like common ground on a few good practices for developing applications. But, given that this is the PHP community, maybe that's too much to expect (so far I think the reaction bears this out [with a few notable exceptions: Shawn, thanks for the kind words and reasoned response]).
Honestly, I don't particularly care if the Eddie Drapkin's of the world adopt these standards or not, since it doesn't really affect me. In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that the likelihood that Eddie will release a PHP project or library that I want to use is vanishingly small. Everyones has an individual choice whether or not they even find these standards useful for them, but we as project leaders have elected to use these standards in our code, so if you plan on using any of our projects, you'll be using the standard anyway, so we might as well be open with people about what those standards are, just in case others do find them useful (which, in my arrogance, I'm going to suggest that, if we as lead developers and prominent community members do, then yes, others might as well).
Finally, to Rasmus' point, yes, PHP is and always will be an Open Source project, and that carries a lot of meaning with it on how things should be run. However, I'd like to point out a subtle but important difference: this is a project of ideas, not code. Suggesting that we should consider the ideas of anyone who stumbles across this list is tantamount to suggesting that PHP internals should be open for anonymous CVS access (http://nerderati.com/open-source-is-not-a-democracy).
Thanks all for your time, and for your efforts in bringing this group to life. The critics will calm down once they see the world is actually better off now.
- Nate Abele
Lead Developer, CakePHP