[development] PHP Standards Group

[Brian Vuyk]

Larry,

Your approach on the matter sounds reasonable.

In the abstract, as far as it meshes with the current architecture, we 
should try to comply in the interests of accessibility and 
interoperability of our codebase.

That said, I have no idea what their standards actually entail. what 
would we be looking at in terms of code modifications to match up with 
these new standards? What kind of refactoring and rewriting would this 
take? Would this be a relatively simple job, or would we be looking at a 
good portion of the D8 or D9 development cycle to come to compatibility? 
What kind of workload will this place on the Drupal dev community?

Either way, you are a good person to have in that discussion.

Brian Vuyk
http://www.brianvuyk.com


larry at garfieldtech.com wrote:
> Back in the spring, a group of PHP developers from several popular 
> "pure frameworks" got together and started a PHP standards working 
> group. Their goal was to standardize certain OO coding standards, in 
> particular the use of namespaces, across PHP projects, even if such 
> standards necessitated some changes in the participating projects' 
> existing code bases.
>
> There was some fallout about the group being self-declared and trying 
> to establish project standards by fiat, with a number of people, 
> myself included, objecting to either the fait accomplis presentation, 
> the details of the proposed standards, or both.  Eventually the core 
> team moved off to an invite-only list, and I largely lost track of them.
>
> Yesterday, they decided they should invite in representatives from a 
> few other frameworks and projects, including Drupal.  I discovered 
> this when I suddenly found myself on the list and getting messages, as 
> I'd been sitting in the pending membership queue for months. :-)  So 
> apparently I'm now the "Drupal representative".  Goodie...
>
> So before I open my big mouth, to what degree are we interested in 
> being involved, and to what degree are we willing to play by the 
> standards this group develops?
>
> Personally, I think we should try to do so where possible.  It's good 
> for inter-operability, reduces the learning curve for 
> PHP-knowledgeable developers coming into Drupal, and frankly a lot of 
> these people have been working with OO PHP a lot longer than we have 
> so there's much to be learned from them.  It also means that we can 
> begin to shift ourselves in the "right" direction for whenever we're 
> able to drop PHP 5.2 and rely on PHP 5.3 namespaces, which will open 
> up all sorts of new and exciting power and weirdness.
>
> However, I'm not sure that we should commit to following the developed 
> standards, period.  As of the last draft I saw, some of them would 
> not, I think, even be compatible with a modular full-stack framework 
> like Drupal to begin with, mostly regarding a universally-applicable 
> autoload pattern.
>
> So I would like to go into the process with a statement of "we'll be 
> involved in developing such standards and will adopt them wherever 
> feasible, but we do not commit to following all standards if they are 
> incompatible with Drupal's basic architecture."
>
> +1, -1, feedback, flames, recriminations, encouragements, death 
> threats...?
>
> --Larry Garfield