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Prominent PHP Users or developers, do your homework (or be humble and keep quiet).

Posted by Pierre in PHP
Thursday, November 9. 2006

It becomes more than annoying to read slides or blog posts from some prominent member of the PHP Community about things they do not know. It is for a warning. It is not aimed to be diplomatic or to target any particular person or group of persons (even if some are obvious ;-). But one thing is sure, we have to worry about what we say about other projects or other developers work.

Why do you…

  • talk about something but has little/no clue about it?
  • make conclusions with using facts or your own opinion?
  • wait the day of the release to talk about possible issues?
  • not describe how good your ideas/developments/PHP is without saying that Foo On Rail, BarSql suck or that “I” killed Web 0.7?

For all this question I only see one answer, self promotion, aggressive marketing and ego boosters. They are all annoying.

  • learn what you are talking about and keep your knowledge up to date (especially for new features, they change a lot during the first year)
  • don’t make conclusions if you don’t even try the softwares
  • don’t use “suck”, “crap” “eat on its head” or other stupid words to describe concurrent technologies or other people work, it does not help PHP and is everything but constructive
  • Your talks or blogs are no bug report, mail php-internal, report a bug or ping the devs on IRC (idle is also not constructive)
  • Don’t wait the release day to make your own promotion on our backs. All PHP releases may introduce new issues, that’s why we have RC and that’s why you (esp. if you are a PHP developer) should test them and report issues or fix them yourself (patch or commit)!

Some useful resourses:

Comments (7)
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dreamscape - #1 - 2006-11-10 02:05 - (Reply)

God forbid anyone point out problems with PHP extensions or his royal highness’s code outside of bugs.php.net. Pierre, did it ever occur to you that many developers choose not to report bugs because you guys make it so much of a hassle from trying to repeatedly justify a vlid claim to being treated like a piece of dirt by the PHP developers? Maybe if you guys fixed your attitude towards bug reporters, more people would report them. Or maybe if so many valid reports were not marked as bogus, more people would report them. Maybe the problem is you guys and not everyone else. Frankly this "the world is against us" bullshit is getting old.

Pierre - #2 - 2006-11-09 19:22 - (Reply)

Christopher, You seem to completely miss my point. You read internals (or not accurately), you know where you can report bugs, you know where you can join me, why are you coming with that now? Anyway better late than never. I will be happy to have have some feedbacks from you.

Christopher Kunz - #3 - 2006-11-09 18:40 - (Reply)

Well, you wanted me to know what I’m talking about, now I do. I just looked at the extension for ten minutes and found a whole stack of problems, just in ONE single filter type. Sorry to say so, but "finished" is not the right terminology for ext/filter. I’ll prepare a proposal for fixes ASAP.

Pierre - #4 - 2006-11-10 02:27 - (Reply)

Dreamscape, besides the bad wording and the complete off base shot, the point of this post is about us in particular, not the lambda users. Us as the people being active php developers or part of the prominant community members. It was not exactly about final users, I perfectly understand all the possible reasons why someone will not post a bug (again or for the first time), but this is another topic.

Aaron - #5 - 2006-11-10 10:38 - (Reply)

I’m not sure if shutting up is the best option. I would prefer that somone does speak up even if the information isn’t 100% correct. This will allow me to open the dialog and give me the opportunity to correct the mis-statement with a simple comment on the blog in question. Obviously it would be the best if people did use the bug tracking system for reporting issues. When preparing talks and articles I regularly come accross issues with the subject matter (this is probably because we are looking at the system from a perspective that is different than the developer). I try to alert the maintainer, but it is easy to see scenarios (hotel wifi trying to get examples to work) when it’s not possible to file a bug report before doing your talk.

Lukas - #6 - 2006-11-10 11:45 - (Reply)

I think Pierre made it perfectly clear that he was talking about people who are part of the internal "in-scene" of PHP, who know the people they need to contact directly etc. Unfortunately Pierre’s post seems to have been misread by many, who now believe Pierre is slapping end users for bringing their thoughts to public forums. But why is so much of a problem for a speaker, well established in the community to contact leads of extension prior to given a talk if they have found issues? Why is it so hard to first mention some issues on IRC, where most of us see each other daily, before ripping some fellow developers work in a public blog? This is all Pierre asked for.

Jana - #7 - 2006-11-10 12:14 - (Reply)

I 100% agree with Lukas. Everyone speaks of community and family – I do not see that much of it anymore. Where is the sensitiveness for ethiks and fairness? Stop demoralizing each other … do more for PHP no matter if you like all the people or not. Only a strong and effective community can bring forward PHP onto a next level.


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