IMO one of the biggest problems of PHP is that maintainers tend to lose interest after some time.
An average author is very active in the beginning, then the extension gets stable (or even is included into the core) and then.. well.. it's not that fun anymore. Writing documentation is boring, fixing bugs on some weird and broken platform is tricky & difficult. Some people get real life - kids, family, real job etc.. Some people just don't do PHP or C anymore..
Extensions just become orphaned, even though they might be used by thousands of people.
Believe me, it's really sad to see those extensions being unmaintained for years.
I don't think it's possible to change the humans nature or the reasons stated above, so I'm currently more interested in finding new maintainers than in returning the old ones. Maybe adding maintainers names to the extension docs would encourage people to take over its maintainance?
I guess we also should create a list of extensions and their maintainers somewhere @ php.net (similar to the EXTENSIONS file), just to gather some attention to the extensions and their maintainers.
Btw, what happened to people.php.net? Did the idea die before even being born?
http://www.php.net/credits.php
Of course, it would have to be kept up to date a little better..
As for people.php.net.. no idea (-:
S
But the fact that I didn't know about it tells something..
I have experienced this when developing a plugin for Wordpress, you get an idea implement it then people request boring features or report problems that you have no interest to fix.
The only suggestions I could make is some sort of rating system for an author, a regular feature on the php homepage of extension developers and donation links for development time like Sourceforge does.
Exactly.
And since we can't give them money, my point is to give some fame.
>some sort of rating system for an author
What kind of? And who would vote?
Donation links - maybe, but then almost everybody has his/her own wishlist available and it's effectively the same thing.
So each bit of docs could have a credits section with a rating and then each author could have a rating based on the votes of that extension. Authors could then be featured on PHP.net on the homepage depending on votes.
The only problem I could see is the quality of the votes, which my idea would be to include a random php related question which would eliminate time wasters which would reduce the quality of votes.
The focus here is gathering new and additional maintainers so a key is to teach people how to maintain. Right now the documentation for working on PHP source is lacking so it would be great if people would work on this topic instead of forcing people to RTFS, read slides from conference talks, read a book, decipher which developer docs are good or old, a bunch of README files, etc. There is no hackers guide and the hill necessary to climb is too great.
Lots of people managed to write an extension from scratch, so I'm pretty sure I'm not far from truth..
Also you can always contact developers directly, they are usually quite responsive to bug reports which have all required info.
Well.. most of them are..