So I am not much of a C hacker .. I never really got into pointers and stuff like that. PHP is so nice and easy. However I still want to give back to C based OSS projects I care about. A while ago I setup a wiki to track todo items for up coming PHP releases and other release related information. The page sees varying activity, but I think its helped Ilia a little bit for his 5.x releases. Its not that relevant for Derick's work on the 4.4.x branch, as that one is about bug fixing and not feature additions. Where I am really hoping it will make a big impact is with PHP 6. I am hoping that the list of todo items will assist in making sure that the next major version of PHP is all around thought out. More importantly the idea is also to make it more transparent to end users what changes they can expect or at least prepare for.
I will be doing a talk to MySQL User Conf on what to expect in PHP6. There I will try to flesh out some of the more cryptic items on the todo list. Furthermore it gives me a good excuse to spend some time on poking the relevant people to update the todo list. So like in the good tradition of many PHP talks, it will hopefully produce some benefit to php.net project, next to the audience that will hopefully take home the latest information hot off the press.
Anyways, I have not started something similar for the PostgreSQL project. Again the idea is to increase the transparency for end users, but even more so increase the transparency for the developers who want to contribute larger patches. Hopefully with this list and me frequently poking the people assigned to each item, I can help make sure that no feature is dropped from a release merely by lack of communication about release deadlines etc. Hopefully this will also make life a little bit easier for Bruce, who is managing the long term todo list and patch queue.
It really seems like for users that want to give back to OSS, but who lack the necessary expertise to hack on the actual code, but who's english is not sufficient to help on documentation (ok I admit documenting was just too boring for me), assisting the release managers is a golden opportunity. So think about your favorite OSS project and check if the release managers could use a helping hand along the lines of what I have done for PHP and PostgreSQL. If you have questions about how to best go about introducing something like this, just drop me a note via email or in a comment.
The PHP documentation team is always looking for additional members (including translators, and back-end work) so if you enjoy creating words read by millions... read more about it here:
