On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Pierre Joye <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 10:23 AM, Sebastian Krebs <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> >> > That being said, there is always a point in a RFC discussion where
> >> > there is nothing left to discuss or argue about, we are so far with
> >> > this one.
> >>
> >>
> >> We've been at this point for a while; no new arguments have been raised
> >> despite several people asking to bring it back in focus.
>
> I totally understand your view on how such discussions go. However it
> was (for what I read) about technical issues and the tones were
> correct, could have been more diplomatic but that's fine imho. I am
> not sure how to solve this problem as we have to discuss things deeply
> and be sure that active core developers actually understand all the
> impact of a given proposal will have, that's a must.
>
I don't think this discussion was about technical issues. Let me summarize
the main discussion points:
* "This will make function calls slower!". Many complaints about this
change hurting performance, even though it was pointed out early on (and
detailed in the RFC) that this is not true.
* "Will you put every function in it's own file?!". This has been repeated
*a lot* in this thread, even though again it has been pointed out early
that there are more reasonable autoloading schemes for functions (e.g.
namespace-to-file)
* "Just use static methods instead". I don't need to comment on the
absurdity of this statement.
* "Which function is autoloaded?" Is the namespaced version or the global
fallback loaded?
Of these, only the last point has been of any benefit to this discussion.
There has also been some minor discussion regarding the API, which is also
relevant. But why does 80% of this thread deal with performance (known
incorrect assumption), unreasonable suggestions of function-to-file
mappings (even though alternatives are known) and suggestions to just not
use functions? It's really hard to fish out the 10 relevant mails in a
discussion spanning 70 in total.
> Sadly Anthony took this whole thing way too personally and is leaving
> php.net, I'm not sure it is a definitive choice but it is a bad move,
> in many ways and for both php.net and himself. It is very common that
> not everyone agree with a proposal, or do not see the needs of it,
> trying to understand its impact or the reasoning behind it. If
> everyone begins to leave as soon as it happens, OSS would die, right
> now.
>
I'm pretty sure that Anthony's reaction is not directly related to this
particular thread - rather it is an accumulation of the very same kind of
discussion we have on nearly every RFC. Discussion is always very circular,
covering issues that have already been addressed (usually even written down
in the RFCs). Typically this kind of pointless discussion happens between
just three or so people and fills the largest part of the thread. Stas is
usually one of those "three" people, though of course I will not imply
causation from correlation.
Nikita