Wow, that was quite a rant from someone who hasn't contributed a damn thing.
Really ? Are you sure ? http://www.zend.com/zend/week/week146.php
Ok, one self-serving fix.
Even if I were someone who never contributed anything to php and is just a user of it ... does my concern or that of thousands of others in the same boat count at all ?
No, not really. Your complaint is basically one of process and whether experimental extensions should be widely distributed. We don't include extensions by default unless we feel the usefulness outweighs the hassle of the fact that it may not be completely finished and tested on every possible platform. Sometimes it takes a while to get it right as well for the more complicated extensions. That's just the way things go.
The central point that these features never made it to production quality previously and that no reason to believe the new cool features advertised may meet the same fate is overlooked and left unaddressed.
You are right, there is no guarantee that our code won't make your curtains catch fire. We don't actually write code for you. We write code for ourselves and happen to share it with you. If you think that is an excuse or a brush-off, then fine, you probably should give up on any and all open source projects because in the end this is how most of them operate.
And you didn't propose a solution. Telling us to "tighten things up" is not a solution. "You suck. I propose that you stop sucking!" Well, thanks, that's helpful. Whether an extension is marked experimental is actually quite arbitrary and different developers have different criteria. It is nearly impossible to force a single set of criteria on people that specifies what "production-quality" is. I deploy plenty of extensions marked experimental on some of the busiest web servers in the world. Does that make these production-quality? In my particular case it does because they meet my particular criteria, but in another environment they may indeed blow up badly.
So, how about proposing an actual solution instead of pissing off the very people who you will need help from to improve things? This solution may be a set of general criteria an extension has to meet to leave its experimental state, a set of test tools, or a group of developers that you convince with your obvious social skills to contribute to this effort.
-Rasmus
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