RE: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
When do you upgrade to a new release of php e.g. 5.3 - 5.4 - As soon as released - wait for the x.1 release - Once our OpCode cache supports it - When previous version hits EOL - When a new feature warrants the upgrade - When my Framework (Zend/Symfony/cake) or Software (Wordpress, Gallery, etc) requires it You should add: When my distro/hosting company upgrades. Also 'When my Framework supports it', as opposed to requires it. -- Niel Archer And: When my favourite stable Linux Distribution (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) supports it. Christian Stoller
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
When do you upgrade to a new release of php e.g. 5.3 - 5.4 - As soon as released - wait for the x.1 release - Once our OpCode cache supports it - When previous version hits EOL - When a new feature warrants the upgrade - When my Framework (Zend/Symfony/cake) or Software (Wordpress, Gallery, etc) requires it You should add: When my distro/hosting company upgrades. Also 'When my Framework supports it', as opposed to requires it. -- Niel Archer niel.archer (at) blueyonder.co.uk -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
On 5 March 2013 15:13, Paul Reinheimer preinhei...@gmail.com wrote: How many servers do you deploy code to Does this need a dev/test/prod split? I think this question should specifically address production servers only. (I'm not sure how this answer steers PHP as a language, but it might be useful for trends over time?) What server do you use in production: - Apache - IIS - nginx There's quite a few alternatives not on this list, and I think it does influence development a little. Servers like nginx, litespeed, cherokee and hiawatha (to name a few) are almost certainly using FPM, and certainly not using the apache module. Maybe a better question would be which SAPI is used in production?
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
Hi Everyone, So I threw this idea out there, then I sat down and tried to come up with questions I'd want answered. There's a bunch, those questions are easy. Then I tried to focus my questions, I wanted questions that could possibly affect or guide the development of PHP as a language. That got much harder. Recognizing that much of how PHP advances is scratch the itch makes it harder still. Here I've got a few questions, as well as my thinking behind them: (I think this question is useful to group responses, we might see radically different responses from people deploying to a few servers versus hundreds) How many servers do you deploy code to 1 2-5 5-20 20-100 100+ (I'm not sure how this should steer PHP, except possibly trying to devote more resources to package maintainers if they're a large chunk of our user base) How do you install PHP on your production machines - Package (RPM, DEV) - Install from source - Executable from php.net (windows) (I'm not sure how this answer steers PHP as a language, but it might be useful for trends over time?) What server do you use in production: - Apache - IIS - nginx (How quickly are these new features being picked up in the language as a whole) Which of the following are you using today: - Namespaces - Closures - [other stuff] (Where are people, also useful for grouping results) What version of PHP are you using in Production -- (what motivates people to upgrade?) When do you upgrade to a new release of php e.g. 5.3 - 5.4 - As soon as released - wait for the x.1 release - Once our OpCode cache supports it - When previous version hits EOL - When a new feature warrants the upgrade - When my Framework (Zend/Symfony/cake) or Software (Wordpress, Gallery, etc) requires it (This, I think, is the biggest question in the survey) Please rank the following in order of importance to you: - New language features - Language Speed - Language stability - Backwards compatibility between releases (I think this is useful in terms of rating priorities. If everyone uses a big framework, then we should temper their opinions against those of the framework authors/maintainers) Do you use any of the following frameworks (check all that apply) - Zend Framework - Symphony - Cake - Code Igniter - ... (Can we convince people with C to help out in the language? Send just PHP developers to work on tests? Documentation?) What other languages do you know: - C - C++ - Perl - Python - Ruby I think you can see that I was challenged by a lot of the questions to answer how it might affect the future of PHP. Some other questions to pull apart classes of responses might be helpful (are you a: hosting provider, development agency, deploying your own corporate code, etc.) but I'm really having trouble coming up with good questions that I think could affect things. Without those I'm not sure how useful the survey is to people on this list. paul On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 5:38 AM, Lester Caine les...@lsces.co.uk wrote: Pierre Joye wrote: hi, On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 9:53 AM, Lester Caine les...@lsces.co.uk wrote: I was in a van with my son-in-law yesterday and we got around to discussing websites and the like. I run his sites, but HE uses Joomla, so although it's PHP he has no interest in the language as such as long as Joomla works. So this morning I though 'What ARE people using with PHP? expecting to see a large chunk of the 90 odd % of websites actually using PHP to be using something to hide that, and got something of a surprise ... http://w3techs.com/**technologies/history_overview/** content_management/allhttp://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all makes interesting reading, and so while I was anticipating that a large chunk of users would be excluded from 'PHP' related questions, the reverse seems to be the truth? We have discussed that hundred of times in the past. However let me try to compare with other mainstream products, in an understandable way: a company A delivers materials to a cell manufacturer The manufacturer sells ready to be used cells to end users. End users do not care if the cell use a chip from Company A or B as long as it works. the manufacturer reports needsfeedback to the company A, based on its customers feedback and needs PHP is the company A, Joomla/Wordpressco are the cell manufacturers. But the point is that apart perhaps for Wordpress, the 'cell manufacturers' are possibly only a very small percentage of the PHP user base? The piece of information we are missing is the split of users between 'cell manufacturer' type users and those that are using PHP direct? What part of the 68% of people 'not using a cms system' are using some other 'cell manufacturer' and what part are just using PHP ... but even then, where a 'cell manufacturer' is no longer around, the end user needs help from PHP to port their website ... which is were a number of my own
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
When do you upgrade to a new release of php e.g. 5.3 - 5.4 - As soon as released - wait for the x.1 release - Once our OpCode cache supports it - When previous version hits EOL - When a new feature warrants the upgrade - When my Framework (Zend/Symfony/cake) or Software (Wordpress, Gallery, etc) requires it You should add: When my distro/hosting company upgrades. Cheers, David -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 7:45 PM, David Muir davidkm...@gmail.com wrote: When do you upgrade to a new release of php e.g. 5.3 - 5.4 - As soon as released - wait for the x.1 release - Once our OpCode cache supports it - When previous version hits EOL - When a new feature warrants the upgrade - When my Framework (Zend/Symfony/cake) or Software (Wordpress, Gallery, etc) requires it You should add: When my distro/hosting company upgrades. Cheers, David -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php It's also important that we figure out how we will go about getting an accurate sampling. Questions about Drupal usage might yield deceptively low results if the polls are being promoted more heavily in Wordpress communities, for example. These are the questions I think we have to answer: 1. Are these surveys invitation-only, open to the public, or both? My vote would be for the latter option; i.e. certain targetted surveys may be invitation-only while others would be open to all. 2. Aside from the obvious posting on the PHP website, how can we go about promoting survey participation in such a way that ensures (or at least tries to ensure) equal or semi-equal participation across a diverse multitude of user communities and demographics? 3. What sorts of demographics do we want to identify among a given survey's sampling? For example, do we want to add questions to determine what percentage of respondents have a newbie/intermediate/expert understanding of PHP, which respondents use certain apps and operating systems, etc? There are also some other broader questions we'll need to answer, such as what procedures we use to decide when to do surveys and what those surveys should contain, how/when to publish the results of completed surveys, etc. I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface here, but before we delve too deeply into what questions should be asked in the first survey, I think there are some basic questions we ourselves need to answer first. =) --Kris
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
Paul Reinheimer wrote: So my suggestion is simple, let's ask them: What they want, What they need, how they installed PHP (source, rpm, deb, provided by hosting provider, Zend Server), etc. Let's create a survey, and link to it prominently on php.net. I considered just writing a survey myself, but even if everyone I knew tweeted it I'd still lack the reach to hit those outside the traditional community. Little backtracking here ... I was in a van with my son-in-law yesterday and we got around to discussing websites and the like. I run his sites, but HE uses Joomla, so although it's PHP he has no interest in the language as such as long as Joomla works. So this morning I though 'What ARE people using with PHP? expecting to see a large chunk of the 90 odd % of websites actually using PHP to be using something to hide that, and got something of a surprise ... http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all makes interesting reading, and so while I was anticipating that a large chunk of users would be excluded from 'PHP' related questions, the reverse seems to be the truth? Perhaps this diversity is just a sign of the flexibility of PHP, but it does highlight the fact that simply getting the likes of Joomla and Drupal on board with current versions of PHP only addresses a small number of end users. Wordpress has an impressive takeup, and figures I was expecting to see for the other two given the hype, but what is highlighted is that the vast majority of users are perhaps using a much wider range of code that all needs to be tested and reworked for new versions of PHP. I suspect the information missing here is the number of smaller project CMS systems and other site generation tools against 'hard coded' PHP websites? But it does perhaps explain why ISP's are having problems moving clients forward where it is not simply a matter of using a later version of a third party tool? -- Lester Caine - G8HFL - Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
hi, On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 9:53 AM, Lester Caine les...@lsces.co.uk wrote: I was in a van with my son-in-law yesterday and we got around to discussing websites and the like. I run his sites, but HE uses Joomla, so although it's PHP he has no interest in the language as such as long as Joomla works. So this morning I though 'What ARE people using with PHP? expecting to see a large chunk of the 90 odd % of websites actually using PHP to be using something to hide that, and got something of a surprise ... http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all makes interesting reading, and so while I was anticipating that a large chunk of users would be excluded from 'PHP' related questions, the reverse seems to be the truth? We have discussed that hundred of times in the past. However let me try to compare with other mainstream products, in an understandable way: a company A delivers materials to a cell manufacturer The manufacturer sells ready to be used cells to end users. End users do not care if the cell use a chip from Company A or B as long as it works. the manufacturer reports needsfeedback to the company A, based on its customers feedback and needs PHP is the company A, Joomla/Wordpressco are the cell manufacturers. Cheers, -- Pierre @pierrejoye -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
Pierre Joye wrote: hi, On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 9:53 AM, Lester Caine les...@lsces.co.uk wrote: I was in a van with my son-in-law yesterday and we got around to discussing websites and the like. I run his sites, but HE uses Joomla, so although it's PHP he has no interest in the language as such as long as Joomla works. So this morning I though 'What ARE people using with PHP? expecting to see a large chunk of the 90 odd % of websites actually using PHP to be using something to hide that, and got something of a surprise ... http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all makes interesting reading, and so while I was anticipating that a large chunk of users would be excluded from 'PHP' related questions, the reverse seems to be the truth? We have discussed that hundred of times in the past. However let me try to compare with other mainstream products, in an understandable way: a company A delivers materials to a cell manufacturer The manufacturer sells ready to be used cells to end users. End users do not care if the cell use a chip from Company A or B as long as it works. the manufacturer reports needsfeedback to the company A, based on its customers feedback and needs PHP is the company A, Joomla/Wordpressco are the cell manufacturers. But the point is that apart perhaps for Wordpress, the 'cell manufacturers' are possibly only a very small percentage of the PHP user base? The piece of information we are missing is the split of users between 'cell manufacturer' type users and those that are using PHP direct? What part of the 68% of people 'not using a cms system' are using some other 'cell manufacturer' and what part are just using PHP ... but even then, where a 'cell manufacturer' is no longer around, the end user needs help from PHP to port their website ... which is were a number of my own customers are trapped. -- Lester Caine - G8HFL - Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
On 2/20/2013 2:35 PM, Christopher Jones wrote: Hi Paul, My thesis is the other way round. More people in the community need to become PHP core developers. This is historically how PHP development has occurred, since nobody has idle time to adopt projects they are not 100% behind. Increasing user involvement is easier (and more often) said than done. I'd prefer to see effort spent mentoring, rather than running surveys. I've suggested this very thing in the past and even with a framework (albeit only in an email thread), I think a mentoring program of sorts would really benefit the core team. It could even be kept in small groups where 1 mentor dedicates to answer and/or find the answer for a group of 1 to 2 people who are keen on learning to help with the core. I would think that a separate mailing list for this type of mentorship would probably make sense, just to keep the chaffe off the internals list to a minimum. It would take some (at least 1) of the current core developers to step up and commit to helping. I ran into a lot of trouble learning what I know about the core and most of the tough question I had went unanswered for one reason or another, was quite infuriating at the time. I do have a lot of reservations about a survey. But if you do run one, I'm sure I'll look at the results. -- -Clint -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 8:40 PM, Florin Razvan Patan florinpa...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 9:24 PM, Christopher Jones christopher.jo...@oracle.com wrote: On 02/21/2013 03:02 AM, Florian Anderiasch wrote: On 02/21/2013 08:14 AM, Pierre Joye wrote: I do not have a single doubt. Why? Surveys are one of many ways to get feedback. They have no contracting values but give us some numbers about one rfc or another. That may help us to focus on one feature instead of another if we see a large number of users looking forward to it. You'll never get perfect results, but I prefer results at all over none :) There have been a lot of those for other languages: - http://cemerick.com/2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-clojure-survey/ - http://survey.perlfoundation.org/ - http://survey.hamptoncatlin.com/ For the mail archives, there are also these (more focused) reports: http://static.zend.com/topics/zend-developer-pulse-survey-report-Q2-2012-0612-EN.pdf http://downloads.zend.com/guides/whitepapers/State_of_PHP_in_the_Enterprise_061212.pdf Chris -- christopher.jo...@oracle.com http://twitter.com/ghrd Newly updated, free PHP Oracle book: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/php/underground-php-oracle-manual-098250.html -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php Hello, I see that people would rather agree with a RFC on polls on the website so I think we should rather get a RFC going and take it from there. I'll gladly make it if needed so just let me know. Also, maybe the conference organizers could help the PHP community by having surveys at the conference they are organizing and provide the feedback on their website. What do you think? Best regards. Florin Patan https://github.com/dlsniper Hello, I've added the following RFC to allow discussion on it: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/site_voting_poll If there's a need for a patch before proceeding with the next step of this let me know. Best regards Florin Patan https://github.com/dlsniper -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 9:24 PM, Christopher Jones christopher.jo...@oracle.com wrote: On 02/21/2013 03:02 AM, Florian Anderiasch wrote: On 02/21/2013 08:14 AM, Pierre Joye wrote: I do not have a single doubt. Why? Surveys are one of many ways to get feedback. They have no contracting values but give us some numbers about one rfc or another. That may help us to focus on one feature instead of another if we see a large number of users looking forward to it. You'll never get perfect results, but I prefer results at all over none :) There have been a lot of those for other languages: - http://cemerick.com/2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-clojure-survey/ - http://survey.perlfoundation.org/ - http://survey.hamptoncatlin.com/ For the mail archives, there are also these (more focused) reports: http://static.zend.com/topics/zend-developer-pulse-survey-report-Q2-2012-0612-EN.pdf http://downloads.zend.com/guides/whitepapers/State_of_PHP_in_the_Enterprise_061212.pdf Chris -- christopher.jo...@oracle.com http://twitter.com/ghrd Newly updated, free PHP Oracle book: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/php/underground-php-oracle-manual-098250.html -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php Hello, I see that people would rather agree with a RFC on polls on the website so I think we should rather get a RFC going and take it from there. I'll gladly make it if needed so just let me know. Also, maybe the conference organizers could help the PHP community by having surveys at the conference they are organizing and provide the feedback on their website. What do you think? Best regards. Florin Patan https://github.com/dlsniper -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
On 02/21/2013 08:14 AM, Pierre Joye wrote: I do not have a single doubt. Why? Surveys are one of many ways to get feedback. They have no contracting values but give us some numbers about one rfc or another. That may help us to focus on one feature instead of another if we see a large number of users looking forward to it. You'll never get perfect results, but I prefer results at all over none :) There have been a lot of those for other languages: - http://cemerick.com/2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-clojure-survey/ - http://survey.perlfoundation.org/ - http://survey.hamptoncatlin.com/ Looking forward to this, especially if we could get a few thousand people to vote. Greetings, Florian -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
On 02/21/2013 03:02 AM, Florian Anderiasch wrote: On 02/21/2013 08:14 AM, Pierre Joye wrote: I do not have a single doubt. Why? Surveys are one of many ways to get feedback. They have no contracting values but give us some numbers about one rfc or another. That may help us to focus on one feature instead of another if we see a large number of users looking forward to it. You'll never get perfect results, but I prefer results at all over none :) There have been a lot of those for other languages: - http://cemerick.com/2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-clojure-survey/ - http://survey.perlfoundation.org/ - http://survey.hamptoncatlin.com/ For the mail archives, there are also these (more focused) reports: http://static.zend.com/topics/zend-developer-pulse-survey-report-Q2-2012-0612-EN.pdf http://downloads.zend.com/guides/whitepapers/State_of_PHP_in_the_Enterprise_061212.pdf Chris -- christopher.jo...@oracle.com http://twitter.com/ghrd Newly updated, free PHP Oracle book: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/php/underground-php-oracle-manual-098250.html -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:00 PM, Paul Reinheimer preinhei...@gmail.comwrote: Hi All, My apologies for the intrusion, I'll keep this brief. In many discussions over the past few months there has been talk about what the community at large needs. Pierre said just earlier today: I would also say it us time for us to get back in sync with the communities needs. I am not talking about the last days RFCs but in general. The other point that comes up is the difficulty in reaching a large portion of the community. They don't come to conferences, they don't sit on this list, they don't go to user groups. They work with PHP for months or years, but the rest of the community doesn't even know who they are. I believe Rasmus has mentioned this on a few occasions. So my suggestion is simple, let's ask them: What they want, What they need, how they installed PHP (source, rpm, deb, provided by hosting provider, Zend Server), etc. Let's create a survey, and link to it prominently on php.net. I considered just writing a survey myself, but even if everyone I knew tweeted it I'd still lack the reach to hit those outside the traditional community. While this is clearly not a suggestion to change PHP, i'll write this up in RFC format if there's interest. Should give people an opportunity to discuss questions and such. thanks for your time paul -- Paul Reinheimer I like the idea, though I would be extremely concerned about making this survey as scientific as possible so that we don't wind up with biased or inaccurate results. Common examples would be duplicate voting, leading or subjective questions, and limited sampling. If those hurdles could be overcome, I'm all for it. I'd be happy to assist with the RFC and the voting app/questions if there's sufficient interest here. --Kris
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
Hi Paul, On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 10:00 PM, Paul Reinheimer preinhei...@gmail.com wrote: Hi All, My apologies for the intrusion, I'll keep this brief. In many discussions over the past few months there has been talk about what the community at large needs. Pierre said just earlier today: I would also say it us time for us to get back in sync with the communities needs. I am not talking about the last days RFCs but in general. The other point that comes up is the difficulty in reaching a large portion of the community. They don't come to conferences, they don't sit on this list, they don't go to user groups. They work with PHP for months or years, but the rest of the community doesn't even know who they are. I believe Rasmus has mentioned this on a few occasions. So my suggestion is simple, let's ask them: What they want, What they need, how they installed PHP (source, rpm, deb, provided by hosting provider, Zend Server), etc. Let's create a survey, and link to it prominently on php.net. I considered just writing a survey myself, but even if everyone I knew tweeted it I'd still lack the reach to hit those outside the traditional community. While this is clearly not a suggestion to change PHP, i'll write this up in RFC format if there's interest. Should give people an opportunity to discuss questions and such. thanks for your time paul -- Paul Reinheimer Thank you for championing this. I've been promoting this kind of feedback for a while now. Just like the discussion I've had earlier on the IRC channel, I do believe that when proposals are made/are at a point where the internals don't agree with which solution is better and it should affect the community at large, it would be better to just ask the community and see what they want/agree on. The issue would be that in some cases one side would lose but the same thing happens when the debate is done here, on the mailing list, and a solution doesn't satisfy some people and ends up being the standard for the whole community. These votes shouldn't be seen as a must but should serve more as a guideline. As for the problems raised by Kris, I think that a simple system based on the e-mail address of the voter with some prior confirmation / pending approval, like for the mailing lists, should be enough to grant the right to vote or not. Even if some people were to have multiple accounts, I don't think they'd go to the trouble of spawning a very large number of e-mail addresses just to see their favorite option accepted. I'd be more that happy to provide any help possible for the RFC as well as the survey / surveys themselves. Best regards. Florin Patan https://github.com/dlsniper -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:27 PM, Florin Razvan Patan florinpa...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Paul, On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 10:00 PM, Paul Reinheimer preinhei...@gmail.com wrote: Hi All, My apologies for the intrusion, I'll keep this brief. In many discussions over the past few months there has been talk about what the community at large needs. Pierre said just earlier today: I would also say it us time for us to get back in sync with the communities needs. I am not talking about the last days RFCs but in general. The other point that comes up is the difficulty in reaching a large portion of the community. They don't come to conferences, they don't sit on this list, they don't go to user groups. They work with PHP for months or years, but the rest of the community doesn't even know who they are. I believe Rasmus has mentioned this on a few occasions. So my suggestion is simple, let's ask them: What they want, What they need, how they installed PHP (source, rpm, deb, provided by hosting provider, Zend Server), etc. Let's create a survey, and link to it prominently on php.net. I considered just writing a survey myself, but even if everyone I knew tweeted it I'd still lack the reach to hit those outside the traditional community. While this is clearly not a suggestion to change PHP, i'll write this up in RFC format if there's interest. Should give people an opportunity to discuss questions and such. thanks for your time paul -- Paul Reinheimer Thank you for championing this. I've been promoting this kind of feedback for a while now. Just like the discussion I've had earlier on the IRC channel, I do believe that when proposals are made/are at a point where the internals don't agree with which solution is better and it should affect the community at large, it would be better to just ask the community and see what they want/agree on. The issue would be that in some cases one side would lose but the same thing happens when the debate is done here, on the mailing list, and a solution doesn't satisfy some people and ends up being the standard for the whole community. These votes shouldn't be seen as a must but should serve more as a guideline. As for the problems raised by Kris, I think that a simple system based on the e-mail address of the voter with some prior confirmation / pending approval, like for the mailing lists, should be enough to grant the right to vote or not. Even if some people were to have multiple accounts, I don't think they'd go to the trouble of spawning a very large number of e-mail addresses just to see their favorite option accepted. I'd be more that happy to provide any help possible for the RFC as well as the survey / surveys themselves. Best regards. Florin Patan https://github.com/dlsniper -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php Agreed on all of your points, Florin. Perhaps the three of us can make this a collaborative effort if everyone's willing. --Kris
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
On 02/20/2013 12:00 PM, Paul Reinheimer wrote: Hi All, My apologies for the intrusion, I'll keep this brief. In many discussions over the past few months there has been talk about what the community at large needs. Pierre said just earlier today: I would also say it us time for us to get back in sync with the communities needs. I am not talking about the last days RFCs but in general. Hi Paul, My thesis is the other way round. More people in the community need to become PHP core developers. This is historically how PHP development has occurred, since nobody has idle time to adopt projects they are not 100% behind. Increasing user involvement is easier (and more often) said than done. I'd prefer to see effort spent mentoring, rather than running surveys. I do have a lot of reservations about a survey. But if you do run one, I'm sure I'll look at the results. Chris -- christopher.jo...@oracle.com http://twitter.com/ghrd Newly updated, free PHP Oracle book: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/php/underground-php-oracle-manual-098250.html -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
Hi All, My apologies for the intrusion, I'll keep this brief. In many discussions over the past few months there has been talk about what the community at large needs. Pierre said just earlier today: I would also say it us time for us to get back in sync with the communities needs. I am not talking about the last days RFCs but in general. The other point that comes up is the difficulty in reaching a large portion of the community. They don't come to conferences, they don't sit on this list, they don't go to user groups. They work with PHP for months or years, but the rest of the community doesn't even know who they are. I believe Rasmus has mentioned this on a few occasions. So my suggestion is simple, let's ask them: What they want, What they need, how they installed PHP (source, rpm, deb, provided by hosting provider, Zend Server), etc. Let's create a survey, and link to it prominently on php.net. I considered just writing a survey myself, but even if everyone I knew tweeted it I'd still lack the reach to hit those outside the traditional community. While this is clearly not a suggestion to change PHP, i'll write this up in RFC format if there's interest. Should give people an opportunity to discuss questions and such. thanks for your time paul -- Paul Reinheimer
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:35 PM, Christopher Jones christopher.jo...@oracle.com wrote: On 02/20/2013 12:00 PM, Paul Reinheimer wrote: Hi All, My apologies for the intrusion, I'll keep this brief. In many discussions over the past few months there has been talk about what the community at large needs. Pierre said just earlier today: I would also say it us time for us to get back in sync with the communities needs. I am not talking about the last days RFCs but in general. Hi Paul, My thesis is the other way round. More people in the community need to become PHP core developers. This is historically how PHP development has occurred, since nobody has idle time to adopt projects they are not 100% behind. Increasing user involvement is easier (and more often) said than done. I'd prefer to see effort spent mentoring, rather than running surveys. I do have a lot of reservations about a survey. But if you do run one, I'm sure I'll look at the results. Chris -- christopher.jo...@oracle.com http://twitter.com/ghrd Newly updated, free PHP Oracle book: http://www.oracle.com/**technetwork/topics/php/** underground-php-oracle-manual-**098250.htmlhttp://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/php/underground-php-oracle-manual-098250.html -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php I agree that we need more core devs (myself included), but I think it's worth remembering that most PHP developers are not programmers who would be comfortable working in ANSI C. The point of a survey would be to guage what PHP users want. Whether or not we choose to act on that would be up to the actual core devs, but at least we would have some helpful data on what the average PHP developer would like to see. We could probably mitigate your concern (and please correct me if I'm wrong on this assumption) by making it clear in the RFC that these survey results are completely non-binding and intended for informational purposes only.
Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP User Survey
Hi Chris, On Feb 20, 2013 9:36 PM, Christopher Jones christopher.jo...@oracle.com wrote: My thesis is the other way round. More people in the community need to become PHP core developers. This is historically how PHP development has occurred, since nobody has idle time to adopt projects they are not 100% behind. We have more new active contributors than ever before. Actually the top 5 contributors are here for less than a couple of years or even less than one. Increasing user involvement is easier (and more often) said than done. I'd prefer to see effort spent mentoring, rather than running surveys. Having our user at large express their needs or opinion is about contributing. It is actually the very first step to contribution. I do have a lot of reservations about a survey. But if you do run one, I'm sure I'll look at the results. I do not have a single doubt. Why? Surveys are one of many ways to get feedback. They have no contracting values but give us some numbers about one rfc or another. That may help us to focus on one feature instead of another if we see a large number of users looking forward to it. Cheers,
