Hi! > To me that is the purpose of voting, what you’re saying is like > complaining that in a democracy old people with experience has the > same voting power than young ones.
To be clear, PHP user community is not a democracy, neither we want to be. In democracy, every person (marginal cases like resident aliens, infants and prison inmates excluded) gets a vote, on the principle that since the law apply to everyone, everyone must have a say in its design, and once the majority decision is taken, it is mandatory to all members. In software projects, I do not think there's been ever any project that is a democracy of its users. While decisions of the project developers do influence, undoubtedly, the users, it is universally true that the users have no direct control over these decisions. Doing it the way democracy is done would make the project ungovernable, and would likely discourage most volunteers from working on it. Do you imagine Linus asking a vote of all Linux users about how to implement a kernel driver and implementing it only in a way that majority of Linux users approves? > I’m also not sure why one would need to be coding PHP itself to be > able to vote its direction, Because whoever makes the thing defines how the thing is made (of course, it takes more to make PHP than pure C coding, so I am bundling all contributors to the project - however widely defined - together). If you are to build a house, I am not going to tell you how to do it. It's your house, you build it however you want it - even if you might later invite me to visit. If I think the house is badly built, I may refuse to come, and criticize you, but I won't claim the power to tell you how to do it. > I feel it’s sane that people using it have a say in it. Have a say, as in providing feedback and advice - sure, and they do. Having decisive voice, overriding the voice of people who actually implement it, in their own free time, and then give it away for free - no. > I know you (or someone else) explained having a say in it does not > necessarily means having voting power, but I feel it does. I’m not Unfortunately, this is wrong. > sure without voting power I would follow closely RFCs as I do now. So > I think this is where my main disagreement with these criteria is: I > like that people interested in PHP can get access to voting where it > goes. Being just "interested" is not enough to gain decisive power over what other people are doing. If I'm interested in US politics, that doesn't make me a Congressman. > You make it like it’s a gift for people to be able to vote on PHP > RFCs while I feel like it’s good for PHP to have people voting its > RFCs. There's no abstract "PHP" that it'd be good for beyond people who actually develop it. And I don't see how it'd be good for people who develop it to give control over how to develop it to people that don't. > This is exactly the problem with such criteria: It will push people > to do things just to get the criteria, like fix typos in comments or > split features in several commits to make the count. Voting system > criteria should not influence the way we write the code. If we get past contributors contributing again - even if by fixing typos - I see nothing wrong with that. Maybe they'll get a taste for it and then start fixing bugs and implementing extensions :) In any case, I personally am for inclusion-biased system - but still not "anything goes" system. > One last point: Having non-core developers voting puts a higher bar > on RFC redacting quality: The author needs to explain his feature > well enough so that people without deep internal knowledge get it. I don't see how the voting process prevents people that didn't get it from voting (either way). In a democracy, people do it all the time ;) So this is really not a solid argument for your point. -- Stas Malyshev smalys...@gmail.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
