Hi Dor. > Am 02.08.2015 um 14:01 schrieb Dor Tchizik <d...@tchizik.com>: > > Hello internals! > > I wanted to propose a change to how PHP discussions are made. > > Currently, PHP discussions are held on the various mailing lists, managed > by an old mailing list system, without any proper alternative interface to > follow and respond outside of mailing. > The discussion is hidden away, deep within the mails and the archives, > searching is nigh impossible for someone from the outside. > Moreover, subscribing to internals and starting discussion has a *very high > entry bar*, which is bad for any open source project (PHP is still > considered an open source project, yes?). For example, ask a friend to try > and find how to join in on the conversation, without mentioning the mailing > list or the word "internals". > > I propose that internals discussion to be moved (eventually entirely) to a > different medium, where the example I have in mind is GitHub issues (but > that is up for discussion). > > > - Every developer worth his salt has a GitHub account. Finding the php > project and looking at the issues is trivial. > - GitHub issues can reference to people by name (triggering an explicit > notification). > - GitHub issues can reference other issues (currently impossible with > the mailing list, unless you link to some archive, and then you can't > really participate in the discussion, nor you have a guaranteed context for > the rest of the discussion) > - GitHub issues can be read and interacted with, from email. (Responding > to an issue/commit comment notification will actually respond to the thread) > - GitHub issues can reference commits directly. > - GitHub commits can reference issues directly. > - You can close GitHub issues. > - GitHub issues are searchable. You have tags. > - GitHub issues can be associated with milestones for easy reference. > - You can comment on specific lines of a commit, and can reference files > and line numbers from issue comments directly. > - You don't need to maintain GitHub, like you do with the current system > - Markdown formatting! > > There are probably more advantages I forgot to mention, but any developer > who's familiar with GitHub (or BitBucket, or practically any other form of > Git integration) knows of these free features and advantages, and most of > them use them and take them for granted. > > Now, that's not to say the current system has no advantages over the > current one. > A few disadvantages of GitHub: > > - GitHub may be down (although I can probably count on one hand how many > times that happened in the past several years) > - GitHub's mailing system is not as robust as the mailing-list software. > People who are exclusively used to emails will have to get used to a > slightly different interface. > - Moving to GitHub (or any other medium) would take some thinking and > work done on the side of the people of internals. > > Personally, I think the advantages would seriously overweigh the > disadvantages. PHP would enjoy a more robust discussion system, and a more > open form of discussion, involving more people and more opinions. > > (I also have a matching workflow adjustment for the RFC process, but that > can be discussed later)
Is this the - in recent times becoming more and more popular - try to replace an open soure interface ( news://, smtp://, irc://, jabber://) with a closed source implementation (github, slack, hiphop, bitbucket)? The mailinglist might be far from perfect (which some people also say about PHP so there's a good match) but it is a well established way of communication in the PHP-community. I strongly believe that it would be counterproductive to change the way of communication of the core contributors for the sake of probanly getting two or three more contributors. At least as long as the alternative is at least as faulty as the current way of communication. And to be honnest: For me it shows a certain understanding of the way the web works when you are able to setup your tools to be able to follow the discussions on internals. And I'm not sure Whether I want someone messing arround with the language that powers 80% of the WorldWideWeb who isn't able to get his tools set up properly. But that's just my 2 arrogant cent. Cheers Andreas -- Andreas Heigl andr...@heigl.org -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
