Interesting observations, Rasmus.
I thought I heard that some developers at Zend were invited to Redmond to
be enlightened about ISAPI? Furthermore, didn't they mention that they
were expecting a big improvement in the stability of the ISAPI module as a
result of this meeting? I have no recollection of where I read this so
take what I say with a grain of salt until you hear otherwise.
At any rate, it would seem a better strategy to seek such invitations from
Microsoft than to throw alot of effort at reverse engineering the black
box?
Regards,
Paul Meagher
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rasmus Lerdorf" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Eric R. Gavin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2001 2:31 PM
Subject: Re: [PHP-WIN] Re: Status of a stable ISAPI??
> 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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