On Tue, Aug 27, 2024 at 2:06 AM Andreas Heigl <andr...@heigl.org> wrote:
> > I see this a bid differently to be honest. While I understand that using > third party packages in our internal tools might make things easier in > the short term it will cause a lot or additional work in the long term. > > Currently we have a lot of small scripts that do one thing. And they do > it for a long time with very little maintenance effort. Blowing these > scripts up with third-party libraries will mean that we will have to put > in much more maintenance effort for either keeping the dependencies up > to date or mostly rewriting the script the moment a change needs to > happen as the libraries will be outdated. > > There are though some actual console applications like Pdt where it > might be valid to use third party dependencies. But also here I'd ask > whether the maintainability will be increased. A totally different > question though is whether we actually need to maintain a special tool > for building the docs or whether we can use a pre-existing tool for > that. I am mainly thinking about either phpDocumentor or a default > docbook renderer. But that is a totally differnt topic IMO. > > So I'd see this exactly the other way around: > > usage for infra needs very careful consideration to not increase the > maintenance-burden on those that actually 'do' the maintenance. I like the fact this has been brought up as it seems an equally important consideration from my perspective. On one hand I remember reading about how PHP Internals could hugely benefit from more volunteers to help maintain the auxiliary projects of the language - which doesn't require C knowledge. Perhaps this 'need' might be outdated now with the Foundation hiring employees to work on PHP. On the other hand there's this really good point about not creating a burden for existing maintainers of existing tools. Ultimately, I find it important to consider that a tool that has been "mostly no maintenance cost" for 10~20 years, then it might be following PHP development practices so long gone that it's harder to capture new volunteers. I understand there's a historical context in the 2000's where PHP frameworks would come and go and most companies had their own in-house framework. That reality is long-gone and community projects like Symfony, Laravel and Composer are sustainable businesses that simultaneously rely on PHP and make PHP better. Nowadays it is unlikely that a PHP developer will pick up greenfield work with the language without using some reliable tool provided by the community. As it has been said, it is a disservice to the PHP project to be stuck on vanilla PHP for things that require improvements, maintainers, revamp, etc. -- Marco Deleu
