Hi Am 2026-06-25 07:16, schrieb Juliette Reinders Folmer:
Tim, I've asked you before to not try to gaslight me, but your current mail still does.
This is an offensive accusation I struggle with replying to. I don't see a basis for your repeated personal attacks and the (incorrect) factual statement that I would try to gaslight you. I can assure you that this is not the intent of my emails.
I have quoted (excerpts of) your emails verbatim and when I reordered the excerpts in the second email I have made that transparent. I have also just double-checked and I don't think that I've cut the excerpts in a way that omits relevant context or misrepresents your statements. In any case all emails are preserved in full in the mailing list archives, allowing anyone to find a public record of what was actually said.
Where I have noted factual errors, I have provided evidence (e.g. quotes from the RFC, or links to the mailing list archive) to back up my replies. I take pride in being thorough in my research and anything I state as a fact being correct. If I indeed made a factual mistake, I would appreciate it being pointed out.
For the parts of my emails that state my *opinion* on something, others are free to disagree. This is why we are having a discussion - and ultimately a vote. While I certainly hope that my opinion matches that of the larger community, I don't take offense with anyone disagreeing. But I expect any factual statements to be correct and backed up by evidence as appropriate.
Your current mail also seems to be largely a response to things I didn't write, so I have no idea what you are trying to do here, other than just sprouting rhetoric which everyone has heard before and nobody is (currently) arguing about.
Except for one paragraph correcting a factual error (the presence or absence of a link in the RFC text), the email was solely explaining why I believe an (unconditional) “Impact Analysis” to be harmful. Given that you brought this up, I believe the email is very much in response to something that you wrote.
I would also like to note that the mailing list is a public forum and the main authoritative source for decisions made by the PHP project. Emails - at least my emails - are primarily targeted at the PHP community at large and not to any specific participant in the discussion. If I feel that it is worth clarifying something, for example because it was a fairly recent change in policies that folks might have missed - such as deprecations officially not being considered a breaking change as of 6 months ago, then I will continue to do so.
If the justification for a deprecation is strong enough, no impact analysis will be able to stop the deprecation from happening. The only thing the impact analysis can do in that case, is mentally prepare people for the amount of work ahead and inform the decision whether the eventual removal of the feature should be in PHP 9.0, or should be delayed to PHP 10.0.
As I had mentioned in my reply to Rowan (https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/131528), I believe the actual deprecation period will be much more valuable in figuring out the impact.
Being against adding an impact analysis for fear of this influencing the vote, is kind of how Brexit happened, which really truly isn't the "golden standard" you seem to think it is....
As I had mentioned the same reply, it is very easy to come up with any number one wants to by carefully selecting the method and data source for the impact analysis or just by accident (not taking account specific edge cases, of which PHP has many). As the saying goes “do not believe any statistic that you haven't forged yourself”.
Best regards Tim Düsterhus
