On Thu, 2008-05-29 at 13:32 -0700, Chris Stockton wrote:

Well, the "commiters" become "commiters" since they show continuing interest in PHP and spent time to learn about the internals and made experiences for taking the consequences from "bad" decisions. There are non-commiters here which are really smart and probably have way more experience than many others around here but many of the commenters here seem not to be of that kind, some say "hey, that's fancy new stuff I want it" but don't think about any consequences ... I simply assume that the amount of these people is less in the "commiters" group, and well, it are the "commiters" who will, most likely, maintain the engine over the nextfew years, non-commiters come and go on this list more frequently.

Besides the "clue" factor there's another point: Most Contributors do stuff _they_ need and by chance "users" get it, too. That in the hope that others contribute, too and create stuff the other one uses. For most people there's not much reason to maintain stuff they don't need all they get is a bigger ego. If a "user" wants a feature he should step up

Oh, and I like that posting from another project's list about that topic: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2007-April/070607.html

Voting? Oh my. I don't agree to all stuff in the book, but in general it's a good read: http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/consensus-democracy.html

Generally speaking: Why should somebody develop and maintain a feature for free he doesn't want? If a "user" wants a feature they should prove that they will maintain it in the longer run and provide a patch. Most stuff in PHP was done since the contributors needed it themselves....

So back to the original topic: In a 50:50 scenario I'd certainly give more weight to people I know for contributing for a long time than somebody who just appeared on the list. That's what I said in my previous mail.

johannes