Re: [PDO] PDO 2: Request for Comments

On 25.01.2008, at 19:40, Bill Karwin wrote:

> Lukas Kahwe Smith wrote:
>> But what if people who would otherwise be regular contributors are  
>> not signing?
> There does not appear to be a large supply of such people, judging  
> from past contributions to PDO.
>
> There *are* people among the RDBMS vendors who wish to contribute,  
> but my understanding is that most of them prefer the contribution  
> process to include a CLA, so that it's clear that all IP in the  
> project is unencumbered and is free for use.

Well I have felt the PDO development process quite alienating myself.  
I am not a C hacker, but I think I can rightfully claim that I knew  
more about designing a unified database API than most of the people  
that were involved in the decision making process in the end. I was  
there form day one (a stroll in the park at LinuxTag 2003 IIRC). I am  
sure there would have been ways I could have contributed (tests,  
documentation) if I would have felt that my contributions would have  
been taken seriously. Anyways, its true there are not that many people  
active in PDO development atm and maybe you are right in saying that  
instead of waiting for new developers, we should go with that offer.

However I feel we are not that far with the core infrastructure with  
PDO. The key missing thing are tests to make sure that we do not have  
needless inconsistencies. That is something I do not think any of the  
vendors really need a CLA to contribute to. Maybe thats the first  
thing for them to do, to show their real world commitment. That might  
encourage enough developers to join the actual fixing and expanding of  
PDO already?

regards,
Lukas