On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 4:11 PM Rasmus Lerdorf <ras...@lerdorf.com> wrote:
> Lots of drama on internals lately. Not that different from 15-20 years ago. > A couple of things to keep in mind for everyone. > > It is not that hard to write a tool that perfectly fits your own needs and > people who are very similar to you in terms of skillset, background and > overall experience. What PHP has always strived to do is to be much broader > than that. Writing a tool that is very approachable to beginners that can > still scale to some of the largest sites in the world is a much harder and > more interesting problem and requires some compromises on both ends. > > The people writing the code get to call the shots, for better or worse. In > the beginning I called all the shots. As more people started to contribute > it took me a while to let go and accept contributions I didn't agree with. > We wouldn't be here today if I hadn't done that. Thanks for chiming in Rasmus. A few brief thoughts on recent discussions: * The RFC process encompasses language changes (breaking or non-breaking), as well as policy and process decisions. We have a very wide selection of precedent cases that affirm this. * The "undefined variables" vote that sparked the current controversy currently sits at 29 in favor of exception and 20 against. That's significantly below the acceptance threshold for RFCs. Things are working as they should: The question has been discussed, put up to vote, and the vote has decided against this course of action (as of this writing, though I expect this to be representative of the final result.) * If people still feel that the acceptance bar for RFCs is too low, it may be increased through an RFC. In fact, we already did so this year, which was great. If anyone wants to pursue this, I recommend raising the threshold in general, as defining what constitutes a "significant" backwards compatibility break is fairly hard and will be prone to argument. * As a personal failure, I should have made the voting option for "undef vars throw exception" be "undef vars throw warning in PHP 8 and exception in PHP 9", which would have provided for a long-term migration timeline for affected code. I apologize for pushing an unnecessarily aggressive option here. * Discussion threads on this mailing list have been very unpleasant recently. I am unwilling to actively participate in them in this form. This is bad for everyone, but particularly for opponents of proposals. It means that we cannot establish the necessary discourse to explore improvements or alternatives. The recent propensity to suppress certain discussion topics entirely, as well as the use of overwhelming quantity to disproportionately push a position, contribute to the unproductive discussion environment. Regards, Nikita
