On 21 July 2024 19:33:11 BST, Juliette Reinders Folmer
<php-internals_nos...@adviesenzo.nl> wrote:
>The crux - to me - is that it is an undocumented breaking change, which by
>definition is a bug.
There are two parts of this which are bugs, in my opinion:
- That it wasn't documented, e.g. with a line in UPGRADING listing the affected
tokens.
- That the tokenisation consumes the comment as part of the token, rather than
just performing a lookahead.
One is easily fixed; the other is more subtle, but maybe fixable.
>As I've said before, I'm not against changing the tokenization, what I'm
>speaking up about is that it was done in an inconsistent, semi-random and
>undocumented way.
As others have said, there is nothing unusual in the process that was followed
here. A minor change was proposed via Pull Request, discussed with multiple
core contributors, and wasn't deemed significant enough for a wider discussion
or RFC.
The documentation probably *should* have been caught during that review,
because it's a common checklist item. The behaviour of the token stream could
have been, but we got unlucky and nobody thought of it. There's no guarantee
that a different process would have done better - there have been changes which
went through a whole RFC process, then a year later someone points out a flaw
that could have been avoided; that's life.
Now that we have spotted it, we need to decide what to do.
Regards,
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]
