PHP RFC: Consolidate Coding Standards Policy Document

• Version: 0.9
• Date: 2014-12-16
• Author: Derick Rethans derick@php.net
• Status: Under Discussion
• First Published at: http://wiki.php.net/rfc/consolidate-coding-standard-policy-document

This RFC is the follow-up on the Policy Repository RFC. That RFC created the Policies Repository, but made no changes to existing documents. An item under “Future Scope” indicated that in the future these documents would be rewritten into an actual document, instead of a collection of RFCs.

This proposal suggests adopting the changes to the Coding Standards and Naming document, and to integrate the CODING_STANDARDS.md file from the php-src repository.

The patch is available at https://github.com/php/policies/pull/11 for review. It has been converted to use RFC 2119 terminology (SHOULD, MUST, etc), mimicking as close as possible the original intended meaning of the text from “Coding Standards and Naming”. Specifically, the original document used “should” a lot, where it really meant MUST. Preliminary review by a select few has tweaked the terms to be as close as possible.

The integration of the CODING_STANDARDS.md file followed, and only includes minor changes to the text, again, specifically to use the RFC 2119 terminology.

As part of the RFC process, wording in the associated Pull Request can be updated, up until the vote opens.

2/3rds majority required.

- The patch is at https://github.com/php/policies/pull/11, and includes previous changes to the text as found by early contributors.

- The original Policy Repository RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/policy-repository