Re: Is PEAR worth the effort?

"Justin Patrin" <papercrane@gmail.com> wrote in message news:432beae040630123135efcd4a@mail.gmail.com... > On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 15:21:36 -0400, Will Merrell <will@coaching-life.com> wrote: > > > > I don't mean to start a flame war here, but I have been working in PHP for a > > while now and am about to start a more extensive aplication. Some of the > > PEAR modules look good and I just wanted to hear what the collected wisdom > > out here thinks about it. > > > > When I try to read the installation instructions my eyes glaze over and roll > > up into my head. Before I fight my way through this learning curve I want to > > know if its worth it? Is this the wave of the future or just a flash in the > > pan? > > PEAR is a repository of lots and lots of useful code. Not only that, > it's *quality* code. All packages have to pass the standards to get in > and package maintainers are expected to keep their packages up to the > standards. The newly appointed PEAR QA group also watches for problems > and imforms authors about them, or can even take action if an author > doesn't respond. > > The basics of using PEAR are very simple. If you have PHP installed, > you should also have pear. Try typing pear upgrade-all at your > command-prompt. If it doesn't work, you either don't have it or your > paths need to be fixed. > > If you don't have it, it's as easy as: > $ lynx -source http://go-pear.org/ | php > > Then you can pear install any package on the site. > > Some may argue that PEAR imposes too much restraint on coding > standards and requires use of the PEAR and PEAR_Error classes. > > The coding standards are there to promote interoperability and easy > readability across all PEAR packages so that you don't have to > re-learn how to do look at all of the code. > > PEAR and PEAR_Error are, according to everyone else, are going to be > pared ;-) down for PHP5, leaving a very minimal amount of extra code > for extra flexibility and such. For the moment, PEAR and PEAR_Error > remain, but IMHO they are very useful. For more discussion (read holy > wars) look at the PEAR and PHP list archives. Justin said it all. Just want to put my vote in for PEAR. Give it a try, you will not regret it. Regards, Torsten Roehr