Re: Re: Status of a stable ISAPI??

Windows development is tough because it includes a lot of black box programming. You send stuff into the various M$ APIs and it spews stuff back at you and from that you try to guess what is happening in the black box. On UNIX systems you can trace all the way down to the kernel level and definitively figure out exactly what is happening. This removes all the guesswork and the resulting code is more stable. The second issue is that we have about a 50:1 ratio of UNIX developers to Windows developers who volunteer their time to PHP development. I think the problem is simply that historically UNIX developers have always worked on open code and they take pride in contributing to projects like PHP. The average Windows developer has a different mindset which for some reason rarely results in significant code contributions to projects like PHP. The third issue is that in the Windows world there is a very clear and distinct separation between the software vendor and the software user. The vendor writes the code, the user buys it and bickers at the vendor when it doesn't work. This is contrary to the way open source software development works. As a user of an open source tool like PHP you are part of the process. It doesn't matter whether you can write code, you can contribute by helping with the documentation, writing well-prepared and concise bug reports, testing release candidates as they appear or helping new users on the various mailing lists. Many people who are used to the standard vendor/user model of proprietary software aren't used to this and they do occasionally piss off the developers of open source projects like PHP by demanding things be fixed or they will take their business elsewhere... Go figure. But, at the technical level, this has nothing to do with being pissed off at anybody, nor is it a lack of financial resources. Money rarely translates to code. It is purely a lack of people who understand all the intricate pitfalls of ISAPI and the other related M$ internals that is necessary to make the PHP-ISAPI version robust. We also lack clear and reproducable PHP-ISAPI bug reports. Most of the ones we get just say that "sometimes it breaks". That doesn't exactly give us much to go on. Try to do a bit of legwork and narrow down exactly under which conditions it breaks. If it is intermittent, try to figure out if you can get it to happen more frequently in certain circumstances, or if you can eliminate the problem by removing something. ie. shoulder some of the initial trial-and-error discovery phase that any problem requires before it can be solved. So, what can you do if you have a strong desire to see better Windows support in PHP? Since what we really need are more strong Windows developers, try to find us some of those. Perhaps you have some on your staff. Encourage them to get involved with PHP. If you have plenty of cash lying around, hire such a Windows developer and assign him the task of helping out. Throwing money at existing PHP developers to get them to change their priorities could also help, but that means they are not working on something else that they previously deemed to be of higher priority for whatever reason. I would rather see more developer resources than a focus shift of the existing ones. -Rasmus On Fri, 7 Sep 2001, Eric R. Gavin wrote: > > Does the PHP staff lack resources to develop the Win32 environment > > sufficiently? (I would help if I knew how) > > Is there a database of current issues, owner of issue and due date? > (normal > > project management stuff) > > Heh... couldn't resist a sarcastic post ^_^ > > I think that all the PHP coders out there are just pissed off that MS won a > good part of their court case. *snicker* > > DOWN WITH THE EVIL BEHEMOTH!!! *lol* > > Anyway, to hopefully add SOME value to this thread. I've basically been > "reading between the lines" on this issue and it seems that there just isn't > any real concern to fix this for Windows NT. It sounds like it works pretty > well with Windows 2000 and I wouldn't be surprised if "the PHP powers that > be" are basically trying to hold their breath and hope everybody moves to > W2K. > > Ironically, that kind of behavior (fixing a problem by upgrading to the > latest and greatest) is the same kind of behavior that slashdot.com will > ENDLESSLY berate Bill Gates for. > > Eric R. Gavin > [this has been an extremely sarcastic post]