Larry,
Your approach on the matter sounds reasonable.
In the abstract, as far as it meshes with the current architecture, we
should try to comply in the interests of accessibility and
interoperability of our codebase.
That said, I have no idea what their standards actually entail. what
would we be looking at in terms of code modifications to match up with
these new standards? What kind of refactoring and rewriting would this
take? Would this be a relatively simple job, or would we be looking at a
good portion of the D8 or D9 development cycle to come to compatibility?
What kind of workload will this place on the Drupal dev community?
Either way, you are a good person to have in that discussion.
Brian Vuyk
http://www.brianvuyk.com
[email protected] wrote:
Back in the spring, a group of PHP developers from several popular
"pure frameworks" got together and started a PHP standards working
group. Their goal was to standardize certain OO coding standards, in
particular the use of namespaces, across PHP projects, even if such
standards necessitated some changes in the participating projects'
existing code bases.
There was some fallout about the group being self-declared and trying
to establish project standards by fiat, with a number of people,
myself included, objecting to either the fait accomplis presentation,
the details of the proposed standards, or both. Eventually the core
team moved off to an invite-only list, and I largely lost track of them.
Yesterday, they decided they should invite in representatives from a
few other frameworks and projects, including Drupal. I discovered
this when I suddenly found myself on the list and getting messages, as
I'd been sitting in the pending membership queue for months. :-) So
apparently I'm now the "Drupal representative". Goodie...
So before I open my big mouth, to what degree are we interested in
being involved, and to what degree are we willing to play by the
standards this group develops?
Personally, I think we should try to do so where possible. It's good
for inter-operability, reduces the learning curve for
PHP-knowledgeable developers coming into Drupal, and frankly a lot of
these people have been working with OO PHP a lot longer than we have
so there's much to be learned from them. It also means that we can
begin to shift ourselves in the "right" direction for whenever we're
able to drop PHP 5.2 and rely on PHP 5.3 namespaces, which will open
up all sorts of new and exciting power and weirdness.
However, I'm not sure that we should commit to following the developed
standards, period. As of the last draft I saw, some of them would
not, I think, even be compatible with a modular full-stack framework
like Drupal to begin with, mostly regarding a universally-applicable
autoload pattern.
So I would like to go into the process with a statement of "we'll be
involved in developing such standards and will adopt them wherever
feasible, but we do not commit to following all standards if they are
incompatible with Drupal's basic architecture."
+1, -1, feedback, flames, recriminations, encouragements, death
threats...?
--Larry Garfield
