Roshan,
I have to say I agree with many of the points you're making, and disagreeing with quite a few as well. Since I do agree with Andi that for whatever reason, this thread has turned non-constructive, I won't reply point by point.
The main point I agree with you about is that it doesn't make sense for extensions to stay tagged with 'experimental' status for years and years, as long as experimental means what it means today. And today it means at least one of two things (a) unstable, and (b) API subject to change. The key problem, the way I see it, is with (b). It's not realistic to tell people that they cannot rely on APIs that have been available for two years because nobody bothered to update the extension status, or because it was 'dumped'.
IMHO, we need to add a few more statuses. I believe that most of the experimental extensions fall under only one of the above categories, and we should make it clearer. Doing something along the lines of giving each extension some sort of stability rating, maybe based on user feedback and maybe just based on the gut feeling of the author, and separating the 'API subject to change' from it, would make good sense.
I strongly and strictly disagree with you as to what the developers should spend their time on. I'm not sure what the person who said 'Opensource is a philosophy, it's not an excuse' had in mind when he said it, but there's one thing you cannot do when you get something for free - and that is demand. Whatever someone chooses to give you is solely at their discretion. And if someone feels great spending his time working on optimizer 0.000001% of performance in soundex() instead of fixing bugs in mysql_connect(), the only things you can do about it are (a) email internals@ politely, hoping to get someone to do you a favour and fix it, or (b) find someone that will do it for you, for a fee.
At 00:14 27/08/2004, Naik, Roshan wrote:
[snip] Hiding (in the bowels of documentation and source code) the fact that the "banner features" are not ready ... is dishonesty. Lets not do that.
None of the 'banner features' of PHP 5 is in an unusable state at this point. There's no dishonesty there. At best, if some are still tagged experimental, it means our system is not that good yet.
Zeev
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