He's bloody right. And Roshan has some points. Actually, I think his idea of
only moving stable extensions into the core distribution isn't that bad.
I have had issues with some of the extensions Roshan mentioned, as well.
There wasn't much I could do about it, but it was annoying.
Rasmus, Andi, whoever, you're missing the point here. You cannot simply
dodge arguments like these by pointing at the fact that PHP is open source.
If you develop software, be it open or closed sourced, and this software
becomes a great success, you bear some responsibility. Microsoft with it's
95% browser market share (and I don't care if it's 80%, 10%, 99%, whatever,
that's not the point here) has the responsibility to continue development of
Internet Explorer, because otherwise the progress in web technology (I'm
talking about client-side stuff here, CSS, XHTML, foo, bar) basically
stalls, as there is no way you can convince all IE users to move over to
Firefox.
Same thing goes for PHP. You've developed something tens or houndreds of
thousands of developers all over the world are using. They rely on what you
tell them, their businesses rely on that, they need to move on, they need
reliable, stable software. Software they have trust in, software they
believe is made by people listening to their concerns and needs. And if you
here tell them that you don't give a whatever on what they're thinking,
you're virtually kneeing them in the guts.
This discussion is not about the extensions being experimental. It's about
the sad issue that here and there these and those people proudly or not
proudly announce that you can do this with PHP, that you can do that, that
you can even do... whatever; that every single foobar extension comes
bundled, and all together it's the coolest web development environment
around.
Actually, PHP _is_ the coolest web development environment around. But it
has it's rough edges, one of them being inconsistencies from release to
release, which happens sometimes. This is annoying, I guess to a lot of
people. Most of them don't complain. I don't complain either, and Roshan
didn't. Because we know that a lot of highly competent people do their very
best to improve PHP, they invest a lot of their free time and probably don't
get any reward for it. But what Daniel, Roshan and I don't like is the weird
attitude shown by some here on the list. That
put-a-sock-in-it-and-fix-it-yourself-or-buzz-of kind of behavior, which is
nothing but improper.
David
