From:	Rob Nicholson	Date:	Wed Dec  5 06:57:03 2007
Subject:	RE: Tests

Tomas,

That is interesting. It seems to me that it would benefit everyone if you 
could contribute the additional tests that you have written back to 
PHP.net. (assuming they are in phpt format) This is good for the whole PHP 
community because PHP needs more tests, and its also good for you because 
if you synchronise your tests regularly with php.net you will find out if 
a php.net internals developer changes the PHP behaviour and changes a 
testcase to match. 

I am working on the PHP runtime in IBM's project zero (www.projectzero.org
) and we have been following the policy I describe above - taking tests 
from PHP.net but also contributing tests that we write back. Our 
continuous integration servers actually pick up any tests that change in 
cvs.php.net and run them - so we know immediately something changes. 

We recently found that some of the array behaviour in PHP 5.3 had changed. 
We found out because a php.net developer changed one of the testcases that 
we had previously committed to match the changed behaviour in the zend 
engine. As a result, next time we synchronised with php.net we found that 
testcase failed on our runtime. 

In the question on namespaces - You might want to hold off on this for a 
while - There is a discussion around removing  namespaces support from PHP 
5.3.

Cheers,
Rob Nicholson







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