PDOv1 was initially a small project created and maintained mostly by 1-2 persons.
Even though it was quite small, it turned out to be a kind of monster which nobody really likes or understands.
Oh.. and did I mention that it never actually worked?
And now we're being forced to have PDOv2, which is of course very much different from PDOv1: it's being developed by a secret group of people (which includes some mysterious "vendors") aand.. it requires signing a legal paper it you want to participate or even read its spec.
PDO does not need a CLA, PDO needs *CARE*.
Doesn't matter how much "vendors" participate in PDO, it's going to be a total failure as long as nobody cares about it.
That was the biggest flaw of PDOv1 and CLA won't magically fix it.
However you are definitively right, PDO needs love but will it be enough to convince their original authors to bring it at another level? to something we really need?
PDO has many benefits already today as it delivers consistency and a common paradigm across the data access layers. Like JDBC in the Java space, I believe those advantages would long-term establish it as the main way to connect to databases.
As is explained in the FAQ, there are many people who are willing to care for PDO, some of them the best people in the business so I believe the contrary to what you write would be true. We would have superior data access compared to today. And to Pierre's comment, as this would be a community project the goals would come from all involved so it's not a matter of knowing better. And in any case, many of the participants have already been active in the PHP community for quite some time.
Also re: it being developed by a secret group of people, again, as you can read in the FAQ the idea is for this to be designed and developed in public with community participation.
Andi
I don't care who is the best in the business if he needs a CLA to share his clue to the project bringing money in his pocket: PHP.
Zend is doing a bad job to promote such actions, despite your efforts to improve PHP. You are making a horrible commercial brand out of one of the most fantastic open source and free project.
My (not so calm) reaction can be read here:
http://blog.thepimp.net/index.php/post/2008/01/24/Say-NO-to-CLA-in-PHP
It's a closed group of people protecting their own business interests.
Move it to ibm.com, omniti.com or zend.com, wherever you want.
It doesn't belong to PHP project anymore.
> you can read in the FAQ
I did, it was quite entertaining.
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having such a mechanism and process will allow the highest level of expertise to be
available both to planning and developing the next generation of PDO
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Can you actually read this and not smile?
If php goes the java way then it must follow an good and published standard
I agree with your comment regarding the quality of PDO 1. Each and every driver behaves completely different as soon as you try non-trivial things or leave common paths. Given it aims to be such an important thing for PHP, QA work on it has been very poor in the past.
Ulf
That driver is in a sorry state.