Amethyst Reese

I’ve been spending time migrating my server from Ubuntu 10.04 to Arch Linux, and in the process I thought very deeply about every PHP application installed on the old server. Five out of the six PHP apps were only there to support the one that really stood on its own: MantisBT, my long-standing bug tracker of choice.

Now, I’ve been a core developer, and de facto release manager, for the project for many years — since I was still in university and getting paid by my then-employer to contribute features and plugins that they wanted to use for their engineering team. Those plugins, like Source Integration, wouldn’t be free without me fighting to license and release them for the community. And I wouldn’t be where I am today without the experience and help I received in turn from the very same community.

I know I haven’t been as involved in the project these days as I would like to be; there is an endless list of features and improvements to make to both the core system and the array of plugins I’ve created for it. Some great community members have stepped up and filled my place at times, while I have at least tried to stay active on the mailing lists and in the IRC channels. I’ve still guided and cut the last couple releases, but I haven’t played a part in shaping the future of the project.

There are multiple competing visions charting new paths for the aging project, with conflicting goals and revision histories, and it really needs a stronger leader to take the reins and guide the project to its next milestones. I’m unfortunately not the person to fill this role, for many reasons. Maybe a few years ago it would have been better timing.

Lately, I’ve come to the realization that I can no longer bring myself to work with PHP for personal projects. I don’t like the syntax, I don’t like where the language is heading, I don’t like how much memory and CPU it requires to run on a web server, and I just spend the whole time wishing I was writing Python code instead.

This blog hasn’t run on PHP or a database for just over a year now, and with my MantisBT install being used mainly for projects I don’t have the time or will to work on, it just seems to be dead weight. Github can serve my needs well enough for the few remaining projects I work on, and without needing a complicated setup on my end. Turning off MantisBT means I no longer need MySQL, PHPMyAdmin, APC, or even mod_php at all. The remaining apps can easily be replaced with external services.

So basically, this is me announcing what I’ve already been practicing for many months now: I will no longer be a developer for Mantis Bug Tracker, but I will remain involved as a mentor for other core developers, or for those seeking some advice on my plugins or creating their own. I won’t be maintaining any of my plugins, but I will look at and accept pull requests until someone else wants to step up as maintainer. I will be removing MantisBT from my site, but will keep a database dump in case I ever need to reference it in the future.

This is not me withdrawing from open source; I have many other projects that I’ve been working on, most of which are written in Python or C++. I find them more enjoyable to deal with, and most importantly, they allow me to break out of the realm of writing web applications. IRC, as old as it is, has been my point of intrigue lately, and is at the core of my current “pet” project.

Regardless of language, you can still find me on Github, where all my toys are available for the public to point and laugh at. And as always, I will answer questions on Freenode as “amyreese”, or via email, although there may sometimes be a long delay before I can reply.

Thank you to everyone who’s contributed to MantisBT or its plugins, and thank you to everyone who helped me on the way to where I’m going.

I really like PHP as a technology, both for its extensibility and its deployment style. I think it is the quickest and most straightforward platform to create web applications with, and frameworks like CodeIgniter make it even better.

I’ve long been on the fence regarding PHP’s type coercion and comparison issues, but a recent bug in Mantis Bug Tracker has made me /facepalm for the first time in my long history of working with PHP:

When I click on “Edit” next to 1.2, mantis shows me the 1.20 properties. When I click 1.1 it shows me 1.10!

The offending snippet of code:

foreach( $g_cache_versions as $t_version ) {
   if ( ( $t_version['version'] == $p_version )
      && ( $t_version['project_id'] == $c_project_id ) ) {
      return $t_version['id'];
   }
}

At first glance, it seems perfectly normal… and then you read the commit log, emphasis mine:

This is due to an incorrect version name comparison in version_get_id whereby the following check between strings was occurring:

if( "1.1" == "1.10" ) { ... }

PHP evaluates this expression to true because 1.1 and 1.10 are treated as floats. We however need to preserve the string type during this comparison, thus we need to use the === comparison operator instead.

I thought I’d seen it all…

As a well-seasoned PHP developer for MantisBT and other projects, but at the same time a seasoned developer in Python, C++, Lua, etc, I found this interesting article on Hacker News, Yet, a short piece on the “history” and development of PHP as a language.

A few choice quotes that I most enjoyed:

I don’t know anyone who programs in PHP and hasn’t … become much more acquainted with the concept of “haystack” and “needle” than any one person should have to in a lifetime.

With time, an experienced developer learns that the only reason why any particular functionality is not in PHP is that it’s not there — yet.

Invariably, PHP developers who try to settle into a framework have the (often irresistible) urge to simply drop it and write their own, because, you see, there is no framework that does things the way he or she wants — yet.

I really like working on the PHP projects that I’m a part of, but every time I write a Python script to do something, it just reminds me of how unsophisticated PHP really is as a language. Perhaps that’s OK; it certainly hasn’t stopped me… yet.