If you read internals (and by read, I mean glance at the barrage of subjects in your inbox), you too have seen the flood of namespaces related emails. I have no technical expertise to add to the conversation. However, unlike the otehr 90% of the people that are like me, I decided not to get involved. The garbage collector being discussed is much more interesting. For those that have not been following along, here is the basics from the best of my memory.
People asked for namespaces.

The powers that be did not want to do them.

Someone with CVS access made a patch and suddenly it was a good idea.

Yay! We have namespaces in PHP6 and maybe 5.3.

Some people with CVS access decided they did not like them again.

Then other people defended them and get major kudos from all over the internet.

Then more patches were made to make them do what the haters wanted them to do.

And now people are again calling for resolution to an issue that afaik, was solved when it was commited to HEAD.

Then there are the pilot fish in all this. They swim along in the conversation trying to steer things their way. They want this feature or that feature or some odd thing that they used Super Pascal for AS400 in 1994. They say things like "while we are talking about namespaces, blah blah blah".

Now, if you don't care what I think about namespaces, you can stop reading here.

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Ok, still here. Namespaces that are one per file, but only protect the functions and classes in the file are pointless. It is syntactical sugar. Instead of my_function. I have the namespace my with a function named function. But, in some other file I can call my::function or use my; and then use function. Boy, that makes it all clear. Right? If it is going to be one per file, lets scope the whole file please. Some of us still use PHP as Rasmus intended (or as I believe he intended). To quickly build pages using includes sanely. My include "header.php"; beats your object with a header method any day. Every developer I have worked with understood include "header.php"; in seconds. But dammit, the down side is that something in header.php eventually makes my life hell because of scoping.

Most of all, would someone please just say the magic words to make the insanity stop. There is a "REAL" internals list somewhere that we can't all see. You guys hash it out on there and then tell us what the plan is. All this back and forth is making us crazy. Maybe I should rehash unicode support again just to see the namespaces discussions die. I am not sure if that would be better or worse.

That is all that I have to say about that.