On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 8:14 PM, Anthony Ferrara <ircmax...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Hey all, > > After reading the Voting Periods email thread, I'm left wondering a simple > question (which has a difficult answer): > > What should we be voting on when voting on an RFC: on the RFC proposed > feature, or on the patch itself? > > I've always approached it as we're voting for the concept (and details) > provided in the RFC. But it appears that other people have been voting on > the specifics of the attached patch (so theoretically an RFC could be > rejected entirely because some people don't like part of the implementation > in C, but are fine with the PHP details). > > I'll leave out my opinion (and justification) for now, I'm curious what you > all think... > > Thoughts? > > Anthony > what I've seen this far is if an rfc includes a patch accepting the rfc means that we accept the patch to be merged. usually that also means that the change will be introduced into the lowest possible version where appropriate (eg, now 5.3 is in basically critical bugfix/security fixes only mode, or how much of a BC break is the proposed change, etc.). I think that in some cases having a vote without an impelentation could be useful. I see two common scenarios: 1. voting before a major task where are multiple options are present (should we use utf-8 or utf-16 internally for the unicode support for example, the RFC would show the pros and cons, some benchmarks, maybe some POC, but not a full fledged implementation because nobody would dare to cook that up until he/she feels that it is backed by a majority of the voters(it can still fail on the implementation and it would require another vote before merging ofc,). 2. voting where the implementation doesn't really an issue, but we want to get the common vision/agreement about some change (should we drop support of archaic/less used platform/compiler/etc.). I also think that listing the potential BC break of an RFC and the suggested target version should a mandatory part of every RFC. I'm almost sure that the accessor RFC would have won over the votes if it would have explicitly targeted the next after 5.5 version (or if it could have reached the current status like 2-3 months ago). Just my 2 cents of course. -- Ferenc Kovács @Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu
