Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP

bugs.php.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 319 posts

Re: We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP

#31

Post by Evbn »

soulclap wrote: post #10
mparlane wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on systems where D) is perfectly reasonable. Where one "small" change results in a hell of a lot of regression testing and doc changes. What I don't get is that they are keen to modify php source. But not to just keep using the same php release? I agree with E, they take floats not strings apparently.

Maybe there are other guidelines (Security related, no maintenance for the old release) that were 'forcing' them to update.

I guarantee that security guidelines were not involved in any decision about which version of PHP to use in a project. All PHP code is security tainted and needs protection at the underlying data service layer.

Re: We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP

#32

Post by damian2000 »

jconley wrote: post #17

Regardless of merit on either side, the attitude presented by the creator of PHP in this post makes PHP and open source in general look bad. Seriously? I still can't believe that's how the situation was handled. EDIT: Rasmus calls the bug reporter an idiot in the first reply. It's probably some sysadmin that has been tasked with upgrading the infrastructure and really has no idea what to do. So rude. It would take ju…

To be honest, I think Rasmus shows some class in how he deals with the issue... others may have been far more abusive.

Re: We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP

#33

Post by Evbn »

jconley wrote: post #17

Regardless of merit on either side, the attitude presented by the creator of PHP in this post makes PHP and open source in general look bad. Seriously? I still can't believe that's how the situation was handled. EDIT: Rasmus calls the bug reporter an idiot in the first reply. It's probably some sysadmin that has been tasked with upgrading the infrastructure and really has no idea what to do. So rude. It would take ju…

Why is one person working on one ancient project the face of open source?

Re: We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP

#34

Post by josegonzalez »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #20
rurounijones wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I couldn't grok what your opinion on semver was. Ruby 1.9 introduced new hash syntax but did NOT break the existing syntax one so it was a minor version release (backwards compatible). PHP made an backwards incompatible change in their code so it should have been a major version increase. So as far as I can see Ruby is in the right and PHP is in the wrong with regards to adhering to semver. Is that not your opi…

Somewhere around Ruby 1.8.6, the stdlib Digest::MD5 syntax changed without any explanation that I know. In one patchlevel of 1.8.6, they've added a check against creating new Ruby objects while the GC is running (I hope I remember this right), breaking all SWIG extensions at once. Ruby 1.8.7 changed the C extension API, I think? I'm not sure if 1.8.7 broke the old one or if 1.9 did. Ruby 1.9 broke "when 5:" in case s…

I used it as the example simply because it is normally a language that is touted quite superior to PHP. I think it is better in some regards - building/using Ruby DSLs is awesome - but not all.

Languages are subject to bugs. If they didn't have bugs, people wouldn't complain.

Re: We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP

#35

Post by lifthrasiir »

soulclap wrote: post #24
lifthrasiir wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the prior behavior, that particular behavior was not documented [1] and subject to change. I do think it is PHP's (very big) fault that the proper documentation on various edge cases is missing, but it is a bit too much to disallow PHP to change undocumented behaviors. That said, the proper documentation is not enough (and PHP does not get this right either); it's rather a mere prerequisite. [1] http://…

Well, exactly. It doesn't say what happens, so pass floats or expect the unexpected. I get your point but I don't think I have ever seen documentation anywhere that covers all of the possible 'abuse' scenarios.

It is possible to add a catch-all clause to the documentation. For example any non-float argument is converted to float via floatval(), or raises an error, and so on. This behavior can be made consistent across every API so that the documentation has only one place to describe it. PHP is missing this either AFAIK.

Re: We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP

#36

Post by josegonzalez »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #16
mparlane wrote: post #3

I am mostly on the side of the bug reporter here. PHP changed the behaviour of a simple method that has been there since PHP4 (which is oooold). It returned 0 previously for "", why change it now? Was "" == 0 a bug ?

Regardless of the prior behavior, that particular behavior was not documented [1] and subject to change. I do think it is PHP's (very big) fault that the proper documentation on various edge cases is missing, but it is a bit too much to disallow PHP to change undocumented behaviors. That said, the proper documentation is not enough (and PHP does not get this right either); it's rather a mere prerequisite. [1] http://…

Documentation is hard, thats why most of it is open source. Pretty sure you can edit the php docs online if you so chose.

Re: We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP

#38

Post by sunils34 »

jconley wrote: post #17

Regardless of merit on either side, the attitude presented by the creator of PHP in this post makes PHP and open source in general look bad. Seriously? I still can't believe that's how the situation was handled. EDIT: Rasmus calls the bug reporter an idiot in the first reply. It's probably some sysadmin that has been tasked with upgrading the infrastructure and really has no idea what to do. So rude. It would take ju…

Can you imagine how Linus would have handled it? I think Rasmus was fairly composed.

Re: We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP

#39

Post by chavesn »

Having number_format in so many thousands of places across so many products is indicative of pretty poor code. If you have bad code, you can hardly expect to be able to upgrade to new versions of the language seamlessly.

Speaking of which, are they going to upgrade to 5.3 without testing all those thousands of places across all their products?

Re: We will try to stop fixing bugs in PHP

#40

Post by fffggg »

phaus wrote: post #22
ahi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To standardize PHP is to create a new language not named PHP.

If you read it until the end you will find out that the technical support representative talking to the irate customer is the creator of PHP. As the creator, PHP can be whatever he decides he wants it to be.

And he has decided it is not a standardized language, by any stretch of the imagination. That's the guy's point, and it's spot-on.

As an aside, I didn't realize there would be people on HN who wouldn't recognize rasmus@php.net immediately.

Post reply on HN