Hi internals, I won't enter on this thread of "Who can vote", but I'll get around it during the exposure of my point of view. I may also point to individual RFCs that were either accepted/rejected or it's still pending. It's a long email, so take a seat and read carefully. I have no means to hurt anyone or be impolite. But many times I did weird things... it wouldn't be the first time if I've done so. It's not my intention.
My short version of this entire email is very simple question. Is PHP meritocracy based? One day, Zeev told me that only people that do something for the language should have voice over it. I completely agree with it. This notion of meritocracy is healthy and it's exactly what pushes an Open Source project forward. Individual contributions should also have a voice. If someone that has no real experience of the internals of this project suggest something, he should be treated as nicely as possible. *sidenote* That's what I felt when I came to #php.pecl and Tyra3l gave some attention to what I was trying to expose. That's awesome and he won a lot of respect to me. If ever I have the opportunity to help him, I'll try my best. But lately I've seen this meritocracy failing multiple times, through multiple ways in PHP. This thread by itself is an attempt to address what the meritocracy stated previously. You all discussed every single argument of voting RFC and approved it. Everything seems to be fine until someone point out that your voting can get out of control due to a dubious argument in that RFC. And now you're trying by many ways to find a new argument to put the control back to you. While I tend to agree the voting process is broken and that it should be changed, I also consider that the voting process shouldn't be changed DURING a voting of another RFC. It should be only changed either before or after. Also, it should not touch that meritocracy that Zeev enforced so much to put on my head, and I think he did it very well. By changing the rules of how major PHP enthusiasts except the ones with SVN karma is really bad. If you're not a maintainer of the language, who are the people that wants to move PHP forward? The PHP tools' project leaders. By denying the voice of them is almost the same as telling there's meritocracy only if you contribute with the language internals. >From now on, you might be anxious waiting for my email to finish to start a reply. Before do that, please continue to read. I want to highlight another RFC where I saw the before mentioned meritocracy fallen into the cracks. http://wiki.php.net/rfc/shortsyntaxforarrays I just want you to read the conclusion. It doesn't matter the content of RFC, just the conclusion. If I could vote on that again, I'd have changed my vote because I found out the complexity of having it implemented after evaluating the patch. But that doesn't take out the matter of that conclusion. If PHP is a meritocracy based language, I thought that everyone have equally voice over it. It doesn't matter if it's php-src SVN karma, php-doc karma, php-website or even user that actively participates on mailing list. But that conclusion just state to me that meritocracy does not exist. We could have +Hundreds/-0 of userland and 0/-Everyone of PHP core and this feature would not be implemented. Why? That RFC exposed correctly. Because userland does not have voice. But wait, the language exists for developers, userland, right? But if they don't have voice, then the language is just a playground of a few, that only when something "cool" is requested for core, it gets implemented. Sorry, but this is not meritocracy, it's a programming hobby. I can even highlight another example, but I'm very afraid to mention it here because I may be completely ignored. Annotations. How many times I've heard "Oh no, *that* subject again, I should not connect today" from some of you. It took me three attempts to improve the language to finally understand that you only accept what you want, not what others want. And even if strong pro arguments, if the RFC isn't the exact same thing you want, you would never accept. I got many prompt responses of "it would never be in core", "we won't touch the symbol table", "if it doesn't belong to pecl, it would never be in core", "do it in docblocks or it will never be implemented". We invest tons of hours until we finally implement that by themselves and tried again, and again and again. I questioned multiple times for RFC stability and all I got was "it won't be implemented" or simply ignored. I didn't even had a change to make a poll. Some would simply say "he only did that because he got 3 proposals rejected". Others would say "he is pressuring A to be in PHP". But not. I learned the hard way and multiple times to hear a big NO. But at the same time, I earn my salary from a language that is lead by people that do only what they want, not what the language really needs. PHP is a mess, everyone knows it. You have the power to change that, to make it right. But only you can do that, only you can approve someone's SVN karma, only you can vote and accept/reject something, according to what you defined. We (I'm putting myself into userland now) can only watch, without a single voice. If we can change and make the language better somehow, one of these steps to achieve it is broken. And I would love to know which one it is, so we can workaround it. Now I come back to original subject. Do you still think PHP is meritocracy based? Ok, you can start a reply. =) Cheers, On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 7:51 PM, Stas Malyshev <smalys...@sugarcrm.com> wrote: > Hi! > >> What I should have said is that in my eyes - as outlined in my other >> replies - >> I don't see any compelling reasons why one should distinguish between >> php-src >> contributors and the others. > > Because the premise here that PHP contributors understand PHP, it's ideas, > limitations, history, goals, technical structure etc. more than anybody > else. Of course, this is not absolute - somebody may have excellent > understanding of PHP and not be a contributor, or contribute into some > narrow area without ever gaining understanding of the project as a whole. > But if we have to have a simple rule of how to identify people that are > informed enough in PHP matters to influence decisions that have huge impact, > that's the best we have right now. Maybe we could have better one, if > proposed, it can be discussed. > -- > Stanislav Malyshev, Software Architect > SugarCRM: http://www.sugarcrm.com/ > (408)454-6900 ext. 227 > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > -- Guilherme Blanco Mobile: +55 (11) 8118-4422 MSN: guilhermebla...@hotmail.com São Paulo - SP/Brazil -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
