[Phpmyadmin-devel] Future of phpMyAdmin

[Robin H. Johnson]

On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 10:37:56PM +0200, Michal ??iha?? wrote:
> Sorry for long mail, but I thing we should somehow face to future.
> Silence in mailing lists and CVS doesn't indicate anything good.
It's not a positive sign, but it's not entirely negative either - there
have been periods of quiet in the past, just because everybody is busy.

> I myself hardly find time to do some work on phpMyAdmin when there are
> other project which attract me more and there is not only coding I want
> to do. Partly it is caused by me needs - I no longer require new
> features from phpMyAdmin for daily work, partly by lack of motivation
> for digging into quite complex parts of code.
I think there is another side to this, that you are perhaps overlooking:
Compared to existing functionality, how much do you actually NEED views
and stored procedures?
There are a great many proponents against stored procedures, claiming
that business logic doesn't belong in the database (I agree with them,
but only because stored procs make maintenance harder than it should be,
you can't keep multiple versions).

Likewise, if your application is complex enough to actually require
views, there are probably other parts of it beyond PMA.

> It looks like all current team members are quite busy with other stuff
> or don't have motivation to work on phpMyAdmin. We're way behind
> current MySQL features by not supporting views and stored procedures,
> which even can not be entered as SQL as changing delimiter completely
> chokes our SQL parser/spliter.
As for changing the delimiter - I have tried to look into the mysqli
interface for it, but I haven't found anything that seems to be correct
for it.

> We probably need fresh blood for team, but I don't see anybody who
> could be interested for this. Anyway fresh blood doesn't mean long
> time active developer. Our latest acquisition (Sebastian) was very
> active in first six months (or so, I don't recall exact numbers) and
> then he seems to run into same problems as all others. This seems to
> tell me there is something wrong with project. Is it it's code base?
> Are team members not enough supportive? Probably partly both, but I
> can't tell real reason.
Our original objectives do stifle some further innovation I agree, but
the innovation is at odds with our objectives. It would be nice to have
an AJAX based PMA, but that wouldn't work on old browsers.

> There is need to move further, in current state we lack many needed
> features, which are requested. We won't loose our position in MySQL
> administration in near future as there is not much competence right
[snip].
As I said, it's a matter of demand for new features - none of us as
developers have a real need for them, so while that continues, we are
unlikely to develop support for them.
In the past, I wrote the initial PHPDBG support, the initial query
parsing, the Mimer SQL validator support, because I needed them.

> Sorry I can't propose where to go. Maybe we should take part on SoC [3]
> with some larger stuff (eg. stored procedure functions), but it's too
> late for it right now.
From being involved with other projects that have partipated in SoC
before, there has been one very specific complaint - after the SoC was
over, they never heard from the students again in many cases - and this
lead to bitrot, because nobody on the existing project could/wanted to
maintain the student's code.

In terms of future stuff, I may be revisiting the SQL parser code soon,
with an eye towards interoperability, because I've been using PostGreSQL
at my job, and phpPgAdmin forked from us a long time ago, and as such,
doesn't have some things that we do, while instead taking different
paths to some functionality - they don't have an SQL parser, but they do
have some support for stored procedures and views.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
E-Mail     : robbat2 at users.sourceforge.net
GnuPG FP   : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED  F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85
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