Scott's Blog

Speaking at PHP UK 2009

I should probably have mentioned this sooner than 3 days before the conference, but I've been swamped with things as of recent.

I'll be giving a talk on the new cool things in PHP 5.3.0. I gave a similar version last year at PHP London, this was before we switched to using the ever popular backslash for the namespace separator. In preparation for the reaction I got at that session and PHPNW panel I created a special slide which will be revealed on the day.

Tickets are still available and includes lunch on the day, there is also an open bar courtesy of Sun / MySQL immediately after the last session. For those who are traveling down the night before there will be a pre-conference social at the bar in the Brook Green Hotel.

Why Apple is a bad open source citizen

In contrast to the other companies that contribute to PHP, there is one bad apple, Apple. (drumroll)

To clarify a few things, I work on the PHP internals, that is the underlying C code that is PHP. My primary development environment for this is a Mac and you could say that I'm a long standing Apple fan boy.

So if you've ever tried to compile PHP on OS X, you'll most likely have problems using the default system libraries and in the end you'll use macports to install libxml and iconv. If you're not trying to compile your own versions of PHP and want to use a PECL extension then you'll find that the binary has had all the symbols stripped. Mid last year I tried to get some of these resolved, and filed a bug report with Apple but was informed these weren't bugs.

Since these weren't bugs and were more a support issue I dropped an email to the Apple Developer Connection address enquiring about getting some help from Apple. The speedy response from a helldesk operator was that for an all time low fee of $499.00 I could get some help from their support technicians.

Assuming I hadn't made it clear that this wasn't a commercial venture I did my best to explain that PHP is an Open Source project and that there was no magical bag of cash in which to give to Apple. If the PHP group had any sort of funds I'd be more than happy to pay. I even went on to explain that the software is already bundled with OS X and we wanted to make it better. I wasn't able to convince them it would be worthwhile and simple got ignored.

Skip forward a few months to December and I decided to give this another go, but this time I start out explaining that the software is already bundled, that we have no money pot to which to dive into and that we just needed some help with the abomination that is the bundled OS X libraries. This time I get a promise of a response soon as they forward it between departments, I let things slide until January and poked them again with the promise of a response soon.

Now its February, and the fact that I'm writing this blog post should suggest that Apple have yet to get back to me with any sort of response.

What was essentially asked for was help to improve PHP on OS X, but this has fallen on deaf ears. Apple are happy to take PHP but don't seem as keen to contribute anything back to the project. Yes they are perfectly entitled to do this, PHP is open source after all. But is waiving a $499 charge too much to ask?

It should be noted that I did manage to partially resolve one of the issues I was originally trying to contact Apple about, so with PHP 5.3+ you'll see support for a few of the missing DNS functions. However there is no guarantee this will work on newer versions of OS X since the PHP project has no access to the future OS X betas.

So if someone reading this knows someone at Apple who can help then leave a comment or drop me an email.

PHP's Relationship with Commercial Entities

I started this blog post as a rant about Apple, so I’m saving that for later on and I thought I’d start with a quick thank you to all those groups and entities involved indirectly with PHP.

The PHP project relies on donations to provide our service infrastructure, this is in the form of hardware and hosting from both individual companies and hosting companies to provide collocation.

We can also thank various hosting companies for providing local country mirrors for documentation and downloads. You can find a list of the mirrors here, the general rule is two per country so if you want to be a mirror then you’re more than welcome.

Along with hardware and hosting we also get some donations from companies in the way of software and employee time and there are a few notable mentions here.

The first huge contribution we have is IBM, they’ve provide a vast quantity of tests that have helped increase our code coverage significantly. Along with these tests they also provide some developers to work on their database extensions and most recently they donated a PPC server for performing tests.

Next up is Microsoft who provide developers in the way of Pierre to work with PHP on Windows along with other developers to work on the new mssql extension. For those working on the PHP Project they will also provide MSDN accounts to obtain the latest software for testing on Windows.

Microsoft also host meetups, the most recent one was in London hosted by Will Coleman who got together some members of the PHP Community and asked for feedback on how Microsoft could improved their relationship with PHP. This was a great opportunity to ask for Microsoft’s help with certain extensions. Prior to that the Microsoft Web Development Summit in Redmond was another great time to talk with the various entities within Microsoft about the way they interact with PHP.

From Sun we have staff working on improving PHP running on Solaris and using suncc along with all the maintenance we have for the MySQL stuff. Sun even contributed mysqlnd which is a native MySQL driver written just for PHP rather than relying on libmysql.

Yahoo! allows their employees to work on PHP, we’ve had plenty of contributions to APC and some of the core stuff from Sara and Rasmus.

Not forgetting Zend who allow Dmitry to work on the engine and Stas to contribute, while they use to do a lot more in the past, it can be said that without Zend, PHP wouldn't be where it is today.

Oracle, Facebook and Digg sponsor developers to work on PHP, their contribution help improves the PHP core and the extensions they work on.

And last but not least the smaller companies who allow their staff to work on PHP, these are companies you've probably never heard but we thank them none the less.

So overall a big thanks to all those companies and more importantly the volunteers who give back to PHP.

Stupid Bug Reports

Recently the PHP project has been receiving an increasing number of rather silly reports, these vary from simply not reading the manual, searching the internet or a fundamental lack of understanding how the internet works.

In December there were several reports but two that jumped out were simply leagues of stupidity above the rest:

Firstly we received a feature request to "Make PHP use less CPU". The proposal was that we should take out our magical wands tap the PHP source code and make it so that a single server could handle millions of visitors of a day. The use case was that we could make Wikipedia run from a single machine....

Unfortunately other users decided to feed the troll here and start giving him suggestions to improve PHP performance.

The second was yet another feature request to make PHP censorship free, the reporter proposed an option to make PHP be unblockable by ISPs. I didn't even know where to start with this request...

Skip forward to January and we got another one of these requests, this time titled "Make PHP more secure". Seemed like a reasonable request until you read the report, the suggestion was to remove the ability to set permanent cookies because this was a security hole.

For those paying attention and went off to read the reports you'll notice that the same person reported these and I'm not particularly picking on this one reporter, it just so happens that they're the most clueless in the past two months.

When you make a bug report or feature request to any sort of project please check you have all of the relevant information and if you can get someone else to check it through. Try searching Google first or ask in a mailing list.

For a performance issue check against an older version of PHP to see if you can work out when it was introduced, if you're not currently testing the CVS version then check that as well. It may have been fixed already. Reports that language X is faster than PHP will also most likely be ignored, these really aren't constructive and unless you can identify the issue within PHP it's pointless to create a report.

Finally, don't get aggressive or be an asshole when your bug reports get closed. PHP is an open source project and most contributors are volunteers. If you don't like something then you are more than welcome to submit a patch.