What is wrong with the PHP community?

The title is not meant to be sarcasm. It's also not meant to be derogatory. Yes, it is criticism, but more important, it is a serious question that someone deep within the community should make an effort to answer, at least for their own internal understanding.

Let me start off by telling a story. A few months ago, I had a question about a bug report that had been closed with with the comment "not a bug." I posed the question on the general PHP mailing list and got a few interesting comments, and one fellow who ripped me a new one along the lines of, "instead of complaining about the way things are done, why don't you submit a patch."

I understand the frustration of open source projects. It's not the slightest bit unusual for people to stop by and scream that "someone should make this easier for me to use" or something similar. It's simply not an effective method of working with an open source project.

But people sometimes get so trigger-happy with that response that they forget to listen to what other people are saying. In my case, I wasn't so much complaining as trying to understand the reasoning.

Look at it from my perspective: I've found what I think is a bug, so I go to PHP's bug reporting system and find that it's already been reported and closed as "not a bug" with a link to the generic "how to submit good bug reports page."

Now, I'm not even second-guessing whether or not the thing really is a bug, all I was trying to do was understand why it was closed as such. The PHP community was generally hostile to me regarding this, and I finally gave up because I had other things to do, and implemented a workaround.

What's going on in the PHP community? Are the number of bitchy, whiny people so high that the people who feel it's their job to say "no bitching or whining" have such a hair trigger finger? For crying out loud, I'm trying to help, I even had suggested patches, but nobody would even listen to me -- and I couldn't figure out why because there was no detail in the close message as to why this is "not a bug", and nobody on the lists seemed to know.

Honestly, if you're going to close something as "not a bug", you should at least put a sentence or two in so that future generations will understand why. You know, "this is the intended behavior" or "see this mail list thread for the discussion" or "can not reproduce this error" ... something.

But I've put that behind me, and I'm trying to move on.

On September 27th, we found another bug in the soap module of PHP. This bug had already been discovered by another, and had been sitting with no response from any developers for two weeks. I didn't have time to wait on people who obviously weren't interested in the bug, so I spent two days digging around until I found the cause and generated a fix. A simple, one-line patch mind you.

Notice that I filled out details on exactly how to reproduce the bug, as well as providing a fix. I thought I'd done a good job. Surely the PHP community would be happy with my contribution and welcome me into their bosom with joy. "Thank you, Bill, for your marvelous contribution to the stability and reliability of our software!"

Not quite. What I have experienced in the two weeks since then is total silence. In spite of the fact that I've sent multiple emails to PHP's soap mailing list, internals mailing list, and dmitry directly.

What is going on with the PHP community? I'm utterly confused as to how I'm supposed to interact with these guys, let alone contribute. I try to ask a simple question and get reamed about not contributing, but when I actually make a contribution it's utterly ignored.

It's amazing to me that the PHP project continues to progress. I suspect that other people who could be contributing have given up because of this. I understand that people are busy, but 2 weeks should be long enough for someone to say, "Thanks Bill, we're swamped with patch submissions right now, but I'll try to look a this before date XXX." I mean, seven emails later you'd think someone would have gotten back to me in some form or another.

Not sure what's going on here. Hope this posting elicits an answer.