Windows development is tough because it includes a lot of black box
programming. You send stuff into the various M$ APIs and it spews stuff
back at you and from that you try to guess what is happening in the black
box. On UNIX systems you can trace all the way down to the kernel level
and definitively figure out exactly what is happening. This removes all
the guesswork and the resulting code is more stable.
The second issue is that we have about a 50:1 ratio of UNIX developers to
Windows developers who volunteer their time to PHP development. I think
the problem is simply that historically UNIX developers have always worked
on open code and they take pride in contributing to projects like PHP.
The average Windows developer has a different mindset which for some
reason rarely results in significant code contributions to projects like
PHP.
The third issue is that in the Windows world there is a very clear and
distinct separation between the software vendor and the software user.
The vendor writes the code, the user buys it and bickers at the vendor
when it doesn't work. This is contrary to the way open source software
development works. As a user of an open source tool like PHP you are part
of the process. It doesn't matter whether you can write code, you can
contribute by helping with the documentation, writing well-prepared and
concise bug reports, testing release candidates as they appear or helping
new users on the various mailing lists. Many people who are used to the
standard vendor/user model of proprietary software aren't used to this and
they do occasionally piss off the developers of open source projects like
PHP by demanding things be fixed or they will take their business
elsewhere... Go figure.
But, at the technical level, this has nothing to do with being pissed off
at anybody, nor is it a lack of financial resources. Money rarely
translates to code. It is purely a lack of people who understand all the
intricate pitfalls of ISAPI and the other related M$ internals that is
necessary to make the PHP-ISAPI version robust. We also lack clear and
reproducable PHP-ISAPI bug reports. Most of the ones we get just say that
"sometimes it breaks". That doesn't exactly give us much to go on. Try
to do a bit of legwork and narrow down exactly under which conditions it
breaks. If it is intermittent, try to figure out if you can get it to
happen more frequently in certain circumstances, or if you can eliminate
the problem by removing something. ie. shoulder some of the initial
trial-and-error discovery phase that any problem requires before it can be
solved.
So, what can you do if you have a strong desire to see better Windows
support in PHP? Since what we really need are more strong Windows
developers, try to find us some of those. Perhaps you have some on your
staff. Encourage them to get involved with PHP. If you have plenty of
cash lying around, hire such a Windows developer and assign him the task
of helping out. Throwing money at existing PHP developers to get them to
change their priorities could also help, but that means they are not
working on something else that they previously deemed to be of higher
priority for whatever reason. I would rather see more developer resources
than a focus shift of the existing ones.
-Rasmus
On Fri, 7 Sep 2001, Eric R. Gavin wrote:
> > Does the PHP staff lack resources to develop the Win32 environment
> > sufficiently? (I would help if I knew how)
> > Is there a database of current issues, owner of issue and due date?
> (normal
> > project management stuff)
>
> Heh... couldn't resist a sarcastic post ^_^
>
> I think that all the PHP coders out there are just pissed off that MS won a
> good part of their court case. *snicker*
>
> DOWN WITH THE EVIL BEHEMOTH!!! *lol*
>
> Anyway, to hopefully add SOME value to this thread. I've basically been
> "reading between the lines" on this issue and it seems that there just isn't
> any real concern to fix this for Windows NT. It sounds like it works pretty
> well with Windows 2000 and I wouldn't be surprised if "the PHP powers that
> be" are basically trying to hold their breath and hope everybody moves to
> W2K.
>
> Ironically, that kind of behavior (fixing a problem by upgrading to the
> latest and greatest) is the same kind of behavior that slashdot.com will
> ENDLESSLY berate Bill Gates for.
>
> Eric R. Gavin
> [this has been an extremely sarcastic post]
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