Yes, but it's not only the engine that would be going into RC, it's the entire distribution.
John has a very good point in that some of the changes that people are looking to PHP 5 for will be extension specific, releasing an RC before the extensions are more or less stable doesn't make sense to me.
I think that this is one of the cases where the saying 'The biggest enemy of good is perfect' applies.
I pretty much disagree with the main point of John. The key features of PHP 5.0, the ones people are talking about, are the new object model, XML (SimpleXML), and maybe mysqli and SQLite. These are all in very good conditions, all RC-quality AFAIK.
Waiting for additional features is wasting time, as simple as that. It doesn't come to say that these additional features are not important. They may very well be very important. But the fact we've been sitting on so many features, ZE2, SimpleXML, mysqli and more and not giving the general public access to them makes no sense. I just can't agree with the notion of 'It makes no sense to release 5.0, just to release 5.1 shortly afterwards'. To that I say - it sure does! That's typically the opensource approach, release early, release often. Given our release cycles as of late, there's no chance we'll meet that theme even if we release tomorrow morning :) But we shouldn't go to the opposite extreme.
My suggestion - we'll work on fixing ZE2 bugs (*). Fix as many as we can as soon as possible, and aim to release on Dec 15. Worst case - we'll delay to Xmas. If enough changes accumulate - we can have B3 too, but I'm not sure it will be necessary, because the betas don't appear to gain too much interest, at least not the kind of interest we need from the wide public.
At this timeframe - if somebody feels he has some very pressing matter that, for some reason, must be ready for PHP 5.0.0 - by all means, finalize it. You have more than a month. But even more importantly, be advised that it's almost certain that this feature does NOT have to be in PHP 5.0.0. It can be in 5.0.1, or 5.1, or 5.2. Guys, major PHP 4 features (like output buffering, output compression, XML support) came post PHP 4.0.0.
Now, while popping mail over a 24,000bps modem in some hotel in Tokyo, I just saw that Andi suggested that we go for Beta 3 around Nov 30. To be honest - again, given the relative lack of wide feedback for the betas - I don't think it will be very beneficial, but I don't think it'll do any harm either. I think we should still try and aim for RC1 for Dec 15, unless we get major negative feedback for B2 or B3 by that time.
BTW - I agree with Edin about some issues that need to be solved, with the most important one IMHO being libxml bundling. In all efforts to avoid a thread on this subject of any shape or form - I'd really like to push the approach of having two source dists - one w/ libxml, and one w/o it, both created by makedist, and available for download. I think that even the biggest advocates of bundling as well as the biggest advocates of PHP-purity can live with that solution. Now the only question is whether there are any volunteers to make the necessary patches to PHP's build as well as makedist that will make this magic ;)
Zeev
(*) I think many of those are actually old ZE1 bugs that were tested to also break ZE2, and given the fact I told Jani that ZE1 bugs are second priority, he retagged them as ZE2 bugs. You may have to keep them for downwards compatibility ;)
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