Some might consider the following a rant, personally
I just feel passionately about php and feel I need to speak up.
that you might consider it/me irrelevant or 'moany' is your
privelege - so with all due respect (
Ilia Alshanetsky wrote:
On 11-May-06, at 4:37 PM, Brian Moon wrote:
How did this thread turn into complaining about tests? The complaint
was about breaking working code. I don't give a crap about tests. I
want my code to work. And, I believe that was the original point of
this thread.
Complaining about your code not working does not earn you any brownie
points,
invalidating anything that crosses your path that seems to be (or is) a
complaint is IMHO shortsighted. IT is essentially a service industry,
dealing seriously with complaints in a professional and dignified manner
(regardless of how rude the 'customer' might be) is the difference between
success and failure.
the relationship between the developers (you) and the end users of php (me)
is symbiotic - both are required for a technology to be successful - with out
the success neither camps have a future earning money using the technology in
question.
As RM you might consider standing up for the interests of your endusers
a little more - they are after all the people that determine wheterh your
releases
will be a success or not.
I don' buy the argument 'we do it for free, so don't complain' for the
simple reason that:
A. it's your own choice, doing something for free doesn't automatically
remove any/all responsibility which may come with the undertaken task.
B. nobody here is completely alturistic - both camps put effort in in
order to
reap the rewards (be it financial, peer-status, whatever) for instance I can't
code C so I can't work on the engine but I can help other coders with their php
problems - so I post regularly on 'generals', I do this to increase php skills
of 'the community' in general (which adds to php programming's saleability) and
to
learn more for myself (making me more saleable) and last but not least to share
a
few laughs.
either propose a patch to fix things or proactively develop PHP
tests that reflect your code so that when developers make changes they
I suggest that some developers need show some restraint in making changes to
satisfy their own personal aesthetic tastes, any normal phper can live with
someone
making a breaking change in order to fix an exotic segfault issue (or whateve)
however
painful it might be, but forcing some purist OO crap on many people that breaks
existing code because one person thinks a certain way if the [only] correct way
is
tantamount to project sabotage (it damages php's credibility which harms phpers
across
the board).
trying hard not to breaking existing code (even when it grinds against ones'
sense of
correctness) should be a higher priority that it has *seemingly* been in the
past.
can clearly see something was broken by the change.
submitting patches requires a level of skill which not everyone has - so
basically
the 'rich' (people with good C skills) have a say and the rest can pretty much
bend over.
submitting adequate tests again requires skills, resources, insight and
knowledge
that most of us mere mortals don't possess - on top of which I would suggest
that a
level of psychic ability is required to predict changes that only exist in some
a
imaginary future which, again, most of us mere mortals don't possess.
in both the case for patches and tests submitting neither does anthing to
relieve the
problem of breakages in released versions, and there are plenty of people out
there
that are at the mercy of a sysadmin (or distro) with regard to what version
they can
use.
regardless it *sounds* very much like your passing the buck, given that your
the RM I suggest the buck should probably stop with you.
kind regards,
Jochem
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