Anthony,
As a rule of thumb, if the language syntax doesn’t change, it doesn’t need a 2/3 vote. How do I know? I asked for this special majority in the first place. It was designed to protect the language from becoming the kitchen sink of programming languages, not from making architectural progress. If we need to amend the original voting RFC text so that it’s clearer – let’s do that. Right now it’s slightly ambiguous because it mentions ‘language syntax’ as an example, instead of outright saying that it’s about that, period. Zeev *From:* Anthony Ferrara [mailto:ircmax...@gmail.com] *Sent:* Thursday, March 07, 2013 6:44 PM *To:* Rasmus Lerdorf *Cc:* Pierre Joye; Nikita Popov; Zeev Suraski; Laruence; PHP Developers Mailing List *Subject:* Re: [PHP-DEV] [VOTE] Integrating Zend Optimizer+ into the PHP distribution Rasmus, We already covered that. An opcode cache doesn't affect the language itself. There is no new syntax and no BC issues. Much like a performance improvement patch that has no effect on the language syntax doesn't need 2/3. Whether it is "major" or not, doesn't matter per the established voting process. You can't both be a stickler for the details of this process and then ignore them when they become inconvenient for you. To be fair, we did cover it, and we didn't come to a consensus. There were a few people like yourself who believe it's not a language change and hence requires 2/3... But there are a lot of other people (many who are raising their hands now) who do believe it's a language level change and hence requires 2/3. Sure, it doesn't effect syntax. But it can be considered a BC change, as the internal zend API changes (not in terms of signatures, but behaviors). All I'm saying here is that while we did discuss it, no consensus was achieved. So I don't think it's fair to say "we already covered that". Anthony PS: How would we resolve something like this? Would it require a 2/3 meta-vote to determine if something needs a 2/3 vote? Seems like we're hitting a limit of the RFC here that perhaps should be refactored... Perhaps make everything require a 2/3 vote, and not have a distinction...
