PHP Internals News: Episode 84: Introducing the PHP 8.1 Release Managers

PHP Internals News: Episode 84: Introducing the PHP 8.1
Release Managers



Thursday, May 13th 2021, 09:12 BST


London, UK



In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I converse with
Ben Ramsey (Website, Twitter, GitHub) and Patrick Allaert
(GitHub, Twitter, StackOverflow, LinkedIn) about their
new role as PHP 8.1 Release Managers, together with Joe
Watkins.


The RSS feed for this podcast is
https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you
can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available
on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website:
https://phpinternals.news


Transcript

Derick Rethans 0:14

Hi, I'm Derick, welcome to PHP internals news, a
podcast, dedicated to explaining the latest
developments in the PHP language. This is episode 84.
Today I'm talking with the recently elected PHP 8.1
RMs, Ben Ramsey and Patrick Allaert. Ben, would you
please introduce yourself.
Ben Ramsey 0:34

Thanks Derick for having me on the show. Hi everyone,
as Derick said I'm Ben Ramsey, you might know me from
the Ramsey UUID composer package. I've been
programming in PHP for about 20 years, and active in
the PHP community for almost as long. I started out
blogging, then writing for magazines and books, then
speaking at conferences, and then contributing to
open source projects. I've also organized a couple of
PHP user groups over the years, and I've contributed
to PHP source and Docs and a few small ways over the
years, but my first contributions to the project were
actually to the PHP GTK project.
Derick Rethans 1:14

Oh, that's a blast from the past. You know what, I
actually still run daily a PHP GTK application.
Ben Ramsey 1:21

Oh, that's interesting. What does it do?
Derick Rethans 1:23

It's Twitter client.
Ben Ramsey 1:24

Did you write it.
Derick Rethans 1:26

I did write it. Basically I use it to have a local
copy of all my tweets and everything that I've
received as well, which can be really handy sometimes
to figuring out, because I can easily search over it
with SQL it's kind of handy to do.
Ben Ramsey 1:41

It's really cool.
Derick Rethans 1:42

Yep, it's, it's still runs PHP 5.2 maybe, I don't
know, five three because it's haven't really been
updated since then.
Ben Ramsey 1:49

Every now and then there will be some effort to try
to revive it and get it updated for PHP seven and
eight, but I don't know where that goes.
Derick Rethans 1:59

I don't know where that's gone either. In this case,
for PHP eight home there are three RM, there's Joe
Watkins who has done it before, Ben, you've just
introduced yourself, but we also have Patrick
Allaert, Patrick, could you also please introduce
yourself.
Patrick Allaert 2:13

Hi Derick, thank you for the invitation for the
podcast, my name is Patrick Allaert. I am a Belgian
freelancer, living in Brussels, and I spent half of
my professional time as a IT architect and/or a PHP
developer, and the other half, I am maintaining the
PHP extension of Blackfire, a performance monitoring
solution, initiated by Fabien Potencier.
Derick Rethans 2:39

I didn't actually know you were working on that.
Patrick Allaert 2:40

I'm not talking much about it but more and more. So I
succeeded to Julian Pauli, who by the way was also
released manager before so now I'm working with
Blackfire people. It's really great, and this gives
me the opportunity to spend about the same amount of
time developing in C and in PHP. This is really great
because at least I don't. It's not just only doing C.
I, at least I connect with what you can do with PHP.
I see the evolution from both sides. And this is
really great. It's great, it's also thanks to you
Derick, you granted me access to PHP source codes.
That was to contribute to testfest something like
12/13 years ago, it was, CVS, at that time.
Derick Rethans 3:28

CVS, so now I remember that. Basically, what you both
of you're doing is making me feel really old and I'm
not sure what I like that or not. I think we all have
gotten less head on our heads and greyer in our
beards. In any case, what made you volunteer for
being the PHP 8.1 RM?
Patrick Allaert 3:46

In my case, I think there were two two reasons is
that PHP really brings a lot to me in my career,
everything is built around my expertise in PHP and
its ecosystem. By volunteering as a release manager.
I think I can give something back to PHP, because the
last time I contributed to source code of PHP, it was
really years ago. If I remember it was array to
string conversion that was very silent and not
emitting any notice; now it's warning. In the
meantime, so I think that was PHP 5.0,
Derick Rethans 4:22

Ages ago.
Patrick Allaert 4:23

Ages ago. Indeed. I was quite passive I was mostly
reading on PHP internals, and most of the time now
that is quite big so if, if I had to say something I
could always see some someone who already just said
the same thing so I was not saying: plus one. This is
one of the reason and the second one I think is that
I think it's kind of a unique opportunity, and I can
learn a couple of things. I think, on day one when
the Rasmus gave me the access, saying that I can do
to OAuth authentication on SSH and that was: okay,
day one I already learned something, so that was
really cool.
Derick Rethans 4:58

And you Ben, I think you tried to be the PHP eight
zero release manager as well at some point. That
didn't happen at the time, but you've tried again.
Ben Ramsey 5:06

I almost didn't try again. I don't know why but when
Sara announced it this year, I thought about it, and
I don't know, I tossed it around a little bit, but
I've been wanting to do it for a long time and I've
noticed as Joe Watkins recently put it on a blog post
that we need to help the internals avoid buses. So
since this is a programming language that I've spent
a lot of time with just as Patrick mentioned, both in
and out of my day jobs. I want it to stick around to
thrive. Since I'm not a C guru, but I do have a lot
of experience managing open source software. I wanted
to volunteer as a release manager, and I hope that I
can use this as an opportunity to inspire others who
might want to get involved, but don't know how.
Derick Rethans 5:55

And of course you just mentioned Joe, Joe Watkins,
who is the third PHP release manager for 8.1, and
that is a bit of a new thing because in the past,
when the past many releases I can remember you've
only had two most of the time.
Ben Ramsey 6:09

I think, on the mailing list that came up early on in
the thread, and there was a general consensus, I
think, consensus may be the wrong word, but there
were a couple of people who spoke up and said that
they wouldn't mind seeing multiple rookies or mentees
or whatever you want to call us, and Joe when he
volunteered to be the veteran, and he was the only
one who volunteered as the veteran. He said that he
would take on two. And so that's that's why Patrick
and I are both here and I think that's a good idea,
because it will continue to help, you know, us to
avoid buses.
Derick Rethans 6:46

Yep. And if you're three, you only have once every 12
weeks. Whereas of course, in my case doing it for PHP
7.4 it's every four weeks, because it's me on my own,
isn't it. Which is unfortunate that these things
happen because people get busy in life sometimes.
Getting started being a PHP release manager can be a
bit tricky sometimes because just before we started
recording, I had to add you to a few mailing lists.
Do you think you've now have access to everything, or
what do you need access to to begin with?
Patrick Allaert 7:18

There is the documentation about release managers,
what are you supposed to do, and, and there is an
effort of documentation, what you have to ask, in
terms of access, and that's great. We are probably
going to contribute with our findings to, to improve
the documentation. Once you did a bit of the setup,
mainly needs to access the servers. You should also
know what is the workflow and what are the usual
tasks. This is mentioned in the documentation, but I
think it would be better to have a live discussion
with someone that already did it. The fact that we
are doing it with Joe Watkins, who is not only a
release manager of 8.1, but also previous release
manager, that should be really smooth, to, to see
what the the orders and what is the routine to do. To
do so, why do you think Ben?
Ben Ramsey 8:16

I agree. I think that, I mean we've only just gotten
started. It's only this I believe is what was it two
weeks ago that we, that this was announced. So this
is the first time that Patrick and I have actually
spoken face to face. Hi, Patrick! We've communicated
by email and slack. I'm sorry not Slack,
StackOverflow chat. Joe has given us a lot of good
pointers. I feel like some of the advice he's given
his been really good, but it's like Patrick said, we
haven't really had like a live, like one on one chat,
or face to face chat, where we could kind of get
caught up on things and understand what the flow
looks like. So last week I started going through a
lot of the pull requests on GitHub. And I've been
tagging them as bug fixes or are enhancements, and
there's also an 8.1 milestone that I've been adding
to a lot of the tickets, are the pull requests, and
I've merged a few of them, but I think that I've
merged them a little prematurely. So there were some
funny things that came up out of that. I do plan to
blog on this, but one of Nikita's comments in the
Stack Overflow chat was, you've just made it your
personal responsibility to add tests for uncovered
parts of the Ristretto255 API.
Derick Rethans 9:40

Right, exactly say because I'm doing release
management for PHP seven four. I don't do any merging
at all. The only thing I'm doing is making the
packages, and then coordinating around them. I'm not
even sure whether it is a responsibility of a release
manager to do.
Ben Ramsey 9:55

It may not be a responsibility. I felt like it was
helpful maybe to go ahead and take a look and see
where things were trying to follow up with people, to
get them to respond if something had been sitting
there for two weeks or so without any kind of
movement. I would, you know, leave a message saying
what's the status of this.
Derick Rethans 10:19

I know from the documentation that we have on our
Release Management process. And many of these steps
actually been replaced by a Docker container that
actually builds the binaries, so I'm not sure whether
Joe I've mentioned that to you yet, because I'm not
sure whether that was around when he did release
management, the previous time.
Ben Ramsey 10:36

Right, it wasn't around either when he did release
management, but he's also mentioned that he would
like for us to learn how to do it without the Docker
container, even if we do plan to use the Docker
container.
Derick Rethans 10:48

That's fair enough, I suppose. I have never had to do
that, but that there you go. Now, what is the
timeline like?
Patrick Allaert 10:56

In terms of timeline I think the very first thing is
being all three release managers having live
discussion to define what, what we should do, when we
should do, and how. This way we clearly knows our
responsibility and the sequence, and also how we are
going to organize. Do we do every three releases? We
share the task? How are we going to do the work
together. In terms of timeline I think the very first
release is going to happen in June, if I remember
correctly. I set up an agenda sheet with ICAL so that
we all can put that in our calendar, nothing really
clear on my side.
Derick Rethans 11:41

From what I can see from the to do list that the
first alpha release is June, 10, which is exactly a
month away from when we are recording this.
Patrick Allaert 11:51

Right, yeah, it's one month come down before the very
first one. I think it might be great that the very
first release being made by by Joe, so that we can
really see every single step he's doing, so that we
can do the same. However, I guess it's kind of a
shared responsibility to do triage of bugs and pull
requests.
Ben Ramsey 12:14

Right. I think there is some desire among the
community to see these releases in real time at least
a few of them. So I'm going to try to encourage us to
stream some of them maybe live, or at least record it
and put it up somewhere for people to kind of just
see the process to demystify it, so to speak.
Derick Rethans 12:35

I actually tried it a few months ago to record it,
but there were so many breaks and pauses and me
messing things up, and me swearing at it, that I had
to throw away the recording. I mean the release went
out just fine but like absolute as again... I can
imagine the first few times, you're trying this there
might be some swearing involved, even though you
might not vocalize that swearing.
Ben Ramsey 12:56

Oh I'll vocalize it.
Derick Rethans 12:58

Fair enough. This is something that is that you're
going to have to do for the next three and a half
years. Do you think you'll be able to have the time
for it in another three years?
Ben Ramsey 13:08

I mean for myself I I'm committed to it, I definitely
believe that I'll have the time over the next three
and a half years, and I'll make the time for it.
Derick Rethans 13:18

What about you, Patrick?
Patrick Allaert 13:20

Exactly the same. I think it's the least that I can
do to PHP, in terms of contributing back, there will
be some changes because I it's not like it's, it's
not like the infrastructure is something that doesn't
change, like for example recently, GitHub, being more
having more focus rather than our Git infrastructure.
So the changes that will happen, we will have to
adapt, I have the impression that release manager has
to, every time it's adapting to change this, and that
will be very interesting.
Derick Rethans 13:53

Luckily we haven't had too many. The only thing I had
to change with a change from git dot php.net to get
up, was my local remote URLs. So there wasn't
actually a lot to do, except for running git remote
set-url. I was pleasantly surprised by this because
if anything messing around with Git isn't my
favourite thing to do.
Ben Ramsey 14:14

Also, merging is a little bit more streamlined now
you don't have to go to qa.php.net to do that.
Derick Rethans 14:21

I've never done anything without
Ben Ramsey 14:23

Really? Oh, I guess you would commit directly to
git.php.net?
Derick Rethans 14:27

Yep.
Ben Ramsey 14:28

If there were PRs on GitHub, the only way to merge
them well, probably wasn't the only way but one way
to merge them was to go to qa.php.net, and if you
were signed in with your PHP account, you were able
to see all the pull requests, and choose to merge
them.
Derick Rethans 14:46

Yep, also something I've never done as an RM. The
only way how I have reacted with pull requests is
commenting on the pull requests, and I wouldn't merge
them myself. With the only exception of security
releases where you need to cherry pick from certain
branches into your release branches. I'm not always
quite sure about it as the responsibility for release
managers actually do the merging into the main
branches. From what I've understood is it's always
the people that made the contributions, who just
merge themselves, and you then sometimes need to make
sure that they merge into the right branch instead of
just master, which is what, as far as I know, the,
the buttons on GitHub do.
Ben Ramsey 15:21

Well the individual contributors, in this case, if
they're doing like a bug fix or something, most of
them, or many of them aren't don't have permission to
do the merging, so someone else has to merge it,
like, often I see Nikita merging, a lot of the pull
requests.
Derick Rethans 15:37

Maybe I've just been relying on Nikita to do that
then. I'm not sure how, bug fixes are merchants debug
fig branches. I think it's usually been done by
people that have access already anyway, because it's
often either Nikita or Cristoph Becker, or Stas, and
the main developments, or the main other new things
that people don't have access to are usually to
master. So I guess there's a bit of a difference now.
I'm not sure what if any other questions, actually,
would have anything to add yourself?
Patrick Allaert 16:05

maybe something that would be quite challenging is
the very recent discussion about the system that we,
that we might change from. The system or the issue
tracker with where we have all the bugs. I understand
the current issues, I understand as well the
drawbacks of what is possibly, for example GitHub
issues. It might be great for some, would it be great
for us? If we do it was going to be in the bring a
lot of changes, and I think, 8.1 will be already
slightly impacted by the change to GitHub in terms of
pull request strategies, but potentially there will
be another change, which is around the bugtracking
system.
Derick Rethans 16:54

I have strong opinions about this, but we'll leave
that for some other time. What about you, Ben?
Ben Ramsey 17:00

Right, I actually don't think that we're going to end
up making a lot of changes in that regard, very,
like, not in the near term, probably. But I did want
to point out, or promote that I've started journaling
some of these experiences, and capturing information
mainly for my own purposes, but I'll be posting these
publicly so that others can follow along. My blog is
currently down right now.
Derick Rethans 17:28

That's because you're using Ruby isn't it?
Ben Ramsey 17:30

That's because I'm using Ruby. The short story of it
is that there are some gems that were removed from
the master gem repository at some point in the past,
or the versions I'm using were removed, either for
security reasons or what I have no idea why. And
that's put, put it into a state where I just can't
easily update. I just haven't, I just don't care,
right now, so I plan on migrating to something else.
In the short term, I'm not going to be doing that. So
I've started writing at https://dev.to/ramsay and
Dev.to is just a developer community website. If
you're on Twitter. It's run by @thePracticalDev, I'll
be, I'll be blogging there.
Derick Rethans 18:18

And I'll make sure to add a link to that in the show
notes as well. Thank you for taking the time this
afternoon, or morning, to talk to me about being a
PHP 8.1 release managers.
Ben Ramsey 18:28

Thank you for having me on the show.
Patrick Allaert 18:30

Thank you, Derick for that podcast. I'm really glad
you invited us.
Derick Rethans 18:39

Thank you for listening to this installment of PHP
internals news, a podcast, dedicated to demystifying
the development of the PHP language. I maintain a
Patreon account for supporters of this podcast as
well as the Xdebug debugging tool. You can sign up
for Patreon at https://drck.me/patreon. If you have
comments or suggestions, feel free to email them to
derick@phpinternals.news. Thank you for listening and
I'll see you next time.




Show Notes




PHP 8.1 Release Todo List




Ben's journal




Joe Watkins' Avoiding busses blog post






Credits



Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod
(incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By
Attribution 3.0