Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 19:03 -0300, Cristian Rodriguez wrote: 2007/10/15, Antony Dovgal [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Thank you? Rarely, as the year advances, people is getting more and more stressed and is certainly not fun to deal with the reports. It's fun to certain point. I've also come to same conclusion as Antony and I only take a peek once in a while to the bug db nowadays. Which is propably a relief to some people reporting stuff there. ;) Also some people tend to think that their bug reports have to be reviewed now (I mean NOW!!!), unfortunately, they fail to recognize that the project is run by volunteers That's the main issue in here, somehow the common thinking is that someone pays (all) the people going over the reports. Having done the job for about 6 years now, I can count the thank you messages with one hand. And that includes the extremely rare cases when I got paid by them..:) -- Patches/Donations: http://pecl.php.net/~jani/ -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
http://www.potentialtech.com/cms/node/48 Hope that article doesn't come across as too harsh, but I really feel like it needed to be said. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
On 10/15/07, Bill Moran [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.potentialtech.com/cms/node/48 Hope that article doesn't come across as too harsh, but I really feel like it needed to be said. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php Bill, Since your blog post didn't allow comments, I'm submitting the original message thread in question right here: On Thu, May 3, 2007 6:59 am, Crayon wrote: On Thursday 03 May 2007 03:18, Richard Lynch wrote: On Wed, May 2, 2007 1:14 pm, Bill Moran wrote: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=39062 This discussion may be better placed on Internals where the people who make these decisions hang out more... Maybe Bill wanted us lowly users to know that the all powerful developers aren't listening to their users. :-) Some of them are definitely listening here. And all of them are trying to juggle needs/demands/desires of an enormous community with more variety than, errr, dog species? Lord knows I'm not real happy with some of the decisions/directions, but you know what? Anybody *really* unhappy that cares enough can get off their butt and start submitting patches, and push things a different direction. Self included, mind you. :-) It seems to me that Lynch was actually just saying, you seem as though you have the technical know-how, so jump in feet-first and let's get going! It wasn't ripping [you] a new one, as you suggested in your post, unless your old one was that defective in the first place and was inadvertently replaced by the new one. ;-P Before you make a public post demeaning the community that drives the project you are using, no doubt, to help put food on your table, why not take a moment to read this fantastic Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm -- Daniel P. Brown [office] (570-) 587-7080 Ext. 272 [mobile] (570-) 766-8107 Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Then you'll find out he was allergic and is hospitalized. See? No good deed goes unpunished -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
In response to Daniel Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On 10/15/07, Bill Moran [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.potentialtech.com/cms/node/48 Hope that article doesn't come across as too harsh, but I really feel like it needed to be said. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php Bill, Since your blog post didn't allow comments, I'm submitting the original message thread in question right here: On Thu, May 3, 2007 6:59 am, Crayon wrote: On Thursday 03 May 2007 03:18, Richard Lynch wrote: On Wed, May 2, 2007 1:14 pm, Bill Moran wrote: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=39062 This discussion may be better placed on Internals where the people who make these decisions hang out more... Maybe Bill wanted us lowly users to know that the all powerful developers aren't listening to their users. :-) Some of them are definitely listening here. And all of them are trying to juggle needs/demands/desires of an enormous community with more variety than, errr, dog species? Lord knows I'm not real happy with some of the decisions/directions, but you know what? Anybody *really* unhappy that cares enough can get off their butt and start submitting patches, and push things a different direction. Self included, mind you. :-) It seems to me that Lynch was actually just saying, you seem as though you have the technical know-how, so jump in feet-first and let's get going! It wasn't ripping [you] a new one, as you suggested in your post, unless your old one was that defective in the first place and was inadvertently replaced by the new one. ;-P Before you make a public post demeaning the community that drives the project you are using, no doubt, to help put food on your table, why not take a moment to read this fantastic Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm Are you implying that I'm being inappropriately sarcastic, or that I'm misunderstanding sarcasm when it's used? Thanks for pulling out your original reply. I intended to post a link to the message thread, but today's been crazy. Hopefully I'll find time to update that post later this week. Now that you've reminded me, you _were_ one of the people who responded in a positive manner. It's possible that the focus of the article is off, as I wasn't as much interested in the mild misunderstandings that occurred on the mailing list. The two things I'm frustrated by are: 1) The use of not a bug to close things that look like bugs with no further explanation 2) The fact that I submitted a fix to a bug 2 weeks ago and nobody has even acknowledged it. Of course, any time you attempt to levy constructive criticism, it's liable to be misunderstood. The fact that you're calling it demeaning is hard evidence that's already happened. My goal here is for others to understand the problem, otherwise, nothing can be done about it. As far as the public posting, I assure you that hardly anybody reads my blog :) http://www.potentialtech.com/awstats/awstats.pl (yes, stats collection has been broken for the past week, but you can see several months of demonstration that nobody cares what I think :) Additionally, I think this discussion is of general interest to all open source groups. A good friend of mine at CMU has been studying open source groups and how they attract contributors, and how they sometimes scare them away. My opinion is that the lack of response from core developers is going to make contributors think their time is better spend elsewhere, and I'd prefer _not_ to see that happen. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
On 15.10.2007 22:05, Bill Moran wrote: http://www.potentialtech.com/cms/node/48 Hope that article doesn't come across as too harsh, but I really feel like it needed to be said. I don't know about Dmitry, but I can explain why I stopped looking through the bug reports lately. So here is my reasoning: I can spend several hours a day fixing bugs and helping other people to fix their problems, explaining their mistakes, and what do I get for that? Thank you? I can't recall when I heard it last time. The only thing I get is personal insults for closing someone's report as bogus. And I also have to prove that it is bogus and close it several times explaining why it is so and why I'm not an asshole. Also some people tend to think that their bug reports have to be reviewed now (I mean NOW!!!), as they probably do not realize that developers may have vacation, they can be busy with their real job, there might be other bugs with much higher priority, or (god forbid!) they can be speaking on some conference. These people also do not realize that most of the extensions are maintained by certain people and other developers are either not interested in fixing them, or are not familiar with the code, or just do now want to touch other people's code without discussing this change with the author (which is another unwritten rule, btw). After all, this kind of job became too frustrating to me and I've decided to take a rest (at least for a while). Thank you for confirming that my decision was right. -- Wbr, Antony Dovgal -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
In response to Antony Dovgal [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On 15.10.2007 22:05, Bill Moran wrote: http://www.potentialtech.com/cms/node/48 Hope that article doesn't come across as too harsh, but I really feel like it needed to be said. I don't know about Dmitry, but I can explain why I stopped looking through the bug reports lately. So here is my reasoning: I can spend several hours a day fixing bugs and helping other people to fix their problems, explaining their mistakes, and what do I get for that? Thank you? I can't recall when I heard it last time. The only thing I get is personal insults for closing someone's report as bogus. And I also have to prove that it is bogus and close it several times explaining why it is so and why I'm not an asshole. Also some people tend to think that their bug reports have to be reviewed now (I mean NOW!!!), as they probably do not realize that developers may have vacation, they can be busy with their real job, there might be other bugs with much higher priority, or (god forbid!) they can be speaking on some conference. These people also do not realize that most of the extensions are maintained by certain people and other developers are either not interested in fixing them, or are not familiar with the code, or just do now want to touch other people's code without discussing this change with the author (which is another unwritten rule, btw). After all, this kind of job became too frustrating to me and I've decided to take a rest (at least for a while). Thank you for confirming that my decision was right. Wow ... sorry to hear that Antony. But you're confirming something I theorized ... there _is_ something wrong with the PHP community. If contributors like yourself have become so frustrated with the users that they don't want to be involved, there is a REAL problem. I expect that this sort of frustration on the part of developers leads to exacerbated frustration on the part of the users, which leads to more frustration on the part of developers ... and so on and so on in an endless loop. (and science claims there's no such thing as a perpetual motion machine) So, I'm not sure I have any suggestions. Looks like PHP is a tough project to be a part of. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
On 15.10.2007 23:16, Bill Moran wrote: But you're confirming something I theorized ... there _is_ something wrong with the PHP community. If contributors like yourself have become so frustrated with the users that they don't want to be involved, there is a REAL problem. You misunderstood what I said. I'm still involved and I'm not going to leave the development. But I do not respond to the reports that are not directly related to the extensions I maintain. And one of the reasons is users like you. I expect that this sort of frustration on the part of developers leads to exacerbated frustration on the part of the users, which leads to more frustration on the part of developers ... and so on and so on in an endless loop. So you decided to help us with that and wrote a nice blog post telling how evil PHP developers made you to wait for two weeks, right? So, I'm not sure I have any suggestions. Looks like PHP is a tough project to be a part of. Well, I do have one. Please do something more useful. Thanks. -- Wbr, Antony Dovgal -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
2007/10/15, Antony Dovgal [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Thank you? Rarely, as the year advances, people is getting more and more stressed and is certainly not fun to deal with the reports. Also some people tend to think that their bug reports have to be reviewed now (I mean NOW!!!), unfortunately, they fail to recognize that the project is run by volunteers -- http://www.kissofjudas.net/ -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
On 10/15/07, Bill Moran [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In response to Daniel Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On 10/15/07, Bill Moran [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.potentialtech.com/cms/node/48 Hope that article doesn't come across as too harsh, but I really feel like it needed to be said. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php Bill, Since your blog post didn't allow comments, I'm submitting the original message thread in question right here: On Thu, May 3, 2007 6:59 am, Crayon wrote: On Thursday 03 May 2007 03:18, Richard Lynch wrote: On Wed, May 2, 2007 1:14 pm, Bill Moran wrote: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=39062 This discussion may be better placed on Internals where the people who make these decisions hang out more... Maybe Bill wanted us lowly users to know that the all powerful developers aren't listening to their users. :-) Some of them are definitely listening here. And all of them are trying to juggle needs/demands/desires of an enormous community with more variety than, errr, dog species? Lord knows I'm not real happy with some of the decisions/directions, but you know what? Anybody *really* unhappy that cares enough can get off their butt and start submitting patches, and push things a different direction. Self included, mind you. :-) It seems to me that Lynch was actually just saying, you seem as though you have the technical know-how, so jump in feet-first and let's get going! It wasn't ripping [you] a new one, as you suggested in your post, unless your old one was that defective in the first place and was inadvertently replaced by the new one. ;-P Before you make a public post demeaning the community that drives the project you are using, no doubt, to help put food on your table, why not take a moment to read this fantastic Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm Are you implying that I'm being inappropriately sarcastic, or that I'm misunderstanding sarcasm when it's used? Thanks for pulling out your original reply. I intended to post a link to the message thread, but today's been crazy. Hopefully I'll find time to update that post later this week. Now that you've reminded me, you _were_ one of the people who responded in a positive manner. It's possible that the focus of the article is off, as I wasn't as much interested in the mild misunderstandings that occurred on the mailing list. The two things I'm frustrated by are: 1) The use of not a bug to close things that look like bugs with no further explanation 2) The fact that I submitted a fix to a bug 2 weeks ago and nobody has even acknowledged it. Of course, any time you attempt to levy constructive criticism, it's liable to be misunderstood. The fact that you're calling it demeaning is hard evidence that's already happened. My goal here is for others to understand the problem, otherwise, nothing can be done about it. As far as the public posting, I assure you that hardly anybody reads my blog :) http://www.potentialtech.com/awstats/awstats.pl (yes, stats collection has been broken for the past week, but you can see several months of demonstration that nobody cares what I think :) Additionally, I think this discussion is of general interest to all open source groups. A good friend of mine at CMU has been studying open source groups and how they attract contributors, and how they sometimes scare them away. My opinion is that the lack of response from core developers is going to make contributors think their time is better spend elsewhere, and I'd prefer _not_ to see that happen. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php I feel a bit weird to be the person to bring this up, but im not quite sure why you are directing your irritation at the PHP Community. Your post makes it sound like its the only community that says such things, and im quite certain that the number of communities with open, and closed, source development all leave much to be said for being friendly because i have been part of many of them. I can understand why you are irritated and feel brushed off, but thats what happened and you shouldn't think that writing a blog entry about it and posting it to the internals mailing list is going to lead to drastic change from within, because the fact still remains that these people are our puppeteers. They are developers just as we are, most with real jobs and responsibilities to boot. if you have a bug to be fixed you may very well have thought of something as being a bug which really isn't. Taking something like that to heart though seems tired and unnecessary.
Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
Bob Chatman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 10/15/07, Bill Moran [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In response to Daniel Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On 10/15/07, Bill Moran [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.potentialtech.com/cms/node/48 Hope that article doesn't come across as too harsh, but I really feel like it needed to be said. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php Bill, Since your blog post didn't allow comments, I'm submitting the original message thread in question right here: On Thu, May 3, 2007 6:59 am, Crayon wrote: On Thursday 03 May 2007 03:18, Richard Lynch wrote: On Wed, May 2, 2007 1:14 pm, Bill Moran wrote: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=39062 This discussion may be better placed on Internals where the people who make these decisions hang out more... Maybe Bill wanted us lowly users to know that the all powerful developers aren't listening to their users. :-) Some of them are definitely listening here. And all of them are trying to juggle needs/demands/desires of an enormous community with more variety than, errr, dog species? Lord knows I'm not real happy with some of the decisions/directions, but you know what? Anybody *really* unhappy that cares enough can get off their butt and start submitting patches, and push things a different direction. Self included, mind you. :-) It seems to me that Lynch was actually just saying, you seem as though you have the technical know-how, so jump in feet-first and let's get going! It wasn't ripping [you] a new one, as you suggested in your post, unless your old one was that defective in the first place and was inadvertently replaced by the new one. ;-P Before you make a public post demeaning the community that drives the project you are using, no doubt, to help put food on your table, why not take a moment to read this fantastic Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm Are you implying that I'm being inappropriately sarcastic, or that I'm misunderstanding sarcasm when it's used? Thanks for pulling out your original reply. I intended to post a link to the message thread, but today's been crazy. Hopefully I'll find time to update that post later this week. Now that you've reminded me, you _were_ one of the people who responded in a positive manner. It's possible that the focus of the article is off, as I wasn't as much interested in the mild misunderstandings that occurred on the mailing list. The two things I'm frustrated by are: 1) The use of not a bug to close things that look like bugs with no further explanation 2) The fact that I submitted a fix to a bug 2 weeks ago and nobody has even acknowledged it. Of course, any time you attempt to levy constructive criticism, it's liable to be misunderstood. The fact that you're calling it demeaning is hard evidence that's already happened. My goal here is for others to understand the problem, otherwise, nothing can be done about it. As far as the public posting, I assure you that hardly anybody reads my blog :) http://www.potentialtech.com/awstats/awstats.pl (yes, stats collection has been broken for the past week, but you can see several months of demonstration that nobody cares what I think :) Additionally, I think this discussion is of general interest to all open source groups. A good friend of mine at CMU has been studying open source groups and how they attract contributors, and how they sometimes scare them away. My opinion is that the lack of response from core developers is going to make contributors think their time is better spend elsewhere, and I'd prefer _not_ to see that happen. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php I feel a bit weird to be the person to bring this up, but i'm not quite sure why you are directing your irritation at the PHP Community. I'm not quite sure where you got the impression that I was irritated. Frustrated, yes. Irritated, no. I think I'll follow up with a second post called What is wrong with the PHP community as I think I've already got a pretty good insight. It appears as if the users are driving the developers insane. It's been a while since I've had so many people assume that my attempts at directly addressing a problem are targeted at them specifically. It's amazing to me that I can put things in the post like, this is not intended to be derogatory and then go on to explain my reason for the post, and people _still_ mistake my intentions. I think it was Hemmingway who said, The ocean is just
Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
Antony Dovgal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 15.10.2007 23:16, Bill Moran wrote: But you're confirming something I theorized ... there _is_ something wrong with the PHP community. If contributors like yourself have become so frustrated with the users that they don't want to be involved, there is a REAL problem. You misunderstood what I said. I'm still involved and I'm not going to leave the development. Fair enough. But I do not respond to the reports that are not directly related to the extensions I maintain. Well, I still consider this a problem. While your clarification is necessary, I don't feel it alters my statement. And one of the reasons is users like you. I've been mulling over how to respond to this statement for a while. Please, for my own edification, describe who you think I am. I'm absolutely certain you're mistaken, please read below. I expect that this sort of frustration on the part of developers leads to exacerbated frustration on the part of the users, which leads to more frustration on the part of developers ... and so on and so on in an endless loop. So you decided to help us with that and wrote a nice blog post telling how evil PHP developers made you to wait for two weeks, right? So, I'm not sure I have any suggestions. Looks like PHP is a tough project to be a part of. Well, I do have one. Please do something more useful. Thanks. I'm unsure where all your hatred stems from. I'm trying to help get a bug in PHP fixed and I'm having difficulty with it. As a result, I'm not trying to address the difficulty directly. I can only assume that you're having a rough day, or that you've dealt with so many jerks lately that your frame of mind is that everyone who criticizes is a jerk. There is, however, such a thing as constructive criticism, and that is what I am trying to do. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
Antony Dovgal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 15.10.2007 22:05, Bill Moran wrote: http://www.potentialtech.com/cms/node/48 Hope that article doesn't come across as too harsh, but I really feel like it needed to be said. [snip] The only thing I get is personal insults for closing someone's report as bogus. And I also have to prove that it is bogus and close it several times explaining why it is so and why I'm not an asshole. I wasn't going to respond to this, then I thought about it a bit. Do you have any idea how insane that statement sounds? If you mark bugs as bogus and you don't expect anyone to question that action ... ? By some theology, the definition of insanity is performing the same action over and over and expecting a different result. If every time I closed a bug with no explanation, a bunch of people jump on me about it, yet I continued to do so, I would _deserve_ the assholes I had to deal with. Or, I could just start putting a brief explanation in the bug report and see if the increased communication led to improved relations with the users. But to keep on the same path and complain that it continues to produce the same result ... that's insanity. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP-DEV] My musings on problems I've had with the PHP community
A few people had already given fairly clear reply as to why things happen the way they do, but since it seems are you still unclear about cause, I'll regurgitate the past comments once again. ;-) First of all you should keep in mind that PHP is an open source project as is the case with many other such projects, people who are contributing their time and effort are volunteers. Thus they tend to focus on things that are interesting to them, such as the extensions they've written, components of the language they use for their day-to- day work, etc... So while there maybe a good number of Core Developers few may look at bugs in areas they are not interested in or feel they lack detailed knowledge about the workings of a particular code. As such few extensions have more then one author/ contributor/maintainer and most developers tend to specialize in various areas of the language. There are certainly some components like the standard extension or the language core where there is more then one contributor, but generally each extension is being actively maintained by a little as one person or as many as 3 at the most. Unless the extension is abandoned by its author, other developers will as a rule not get involved in its development, unless previously cleared by the author to do so, or making a trivial change/fix. In the case of the SOAP extension, there is a fairly active maintainer (who also happens to be the author) who knows the extension the best and does his best to fix issues in said extension as CVS log will show. I appreciate the frustration you may have with having a bug sit for some time and waiting for someone to examine it, even though it has a patch attached. That said most bugs do get fixed, especially those with patches attached to them. Some developers may wait till RC is announced before going through their bug queue, so that they can examine all outstanding issues in one go rather then look at them individually to save time, which can contribute to a slow response. Ilia -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
