Re: Re: PHP 5.1 (Or How to break tousands of apps out there)

Hello Lukas, Friday, November 25, 2005, 9:41:46 AM, you wrote: > Marcus Boerger wrote: >> obviously one problem is that PEAR does ignore coding standards. Classes >> should be prefixed in both pear and core. And neither Date nor File is in >> any way prefixed. In th end all we see here is that we want namespaces asap. > Err, how are we supposed to prefix PEAR::Date? > PEAR_Date? > Date_Date? > Lala_Date? > I guess only the first one is somewhat valid proposal. > Anyways it makes absolute sense to use the best most clear class names > when we add functionality currently missing in PHP. Just as well it > makes sense for php core to do the same thing. > The problem is just that PEAR is not part of the php development cycle. > So whatever API we come up with is totally ignored by php core. This may > be because the PEAR API sucks. It may also be caused by the fact that > usually our implementation will probably be written for a previous PHP > version. > In a perfect world we would define an API, implement it in PEAR as a > testbed for interest and if we find its popular and there are > significant performance improvements to expect from an implementation in > C we take that API and implement it in C. > However I do not see this happening ever. So I do not see a point in > PEAR packages claiming away nice and clear names from php core. We > should either cooperate on the API level or just have php core superseed > PEAR stuff. > PEAR then goes and fixes whatever breakage occurs. What however would be > nice is some advance notice. And where is the entry in the upgrading > guide? Oh and for the record if there is a PEAR class by the name of > Date you can be sure that there is a class by the name of Date as well. > So in conclusion its needlessly messy. I am sure other projects than > PEAR also have a Date class. Maybe we need to teach our users (including > PEAR) that they should simply stick to prefixing everything with 3-4 > letter combinations (maybe even offer a central place to register them, > like we should do in the PEAR channel listing - > http://pear.php.net/channels/). That conclusion means stay with date in ext/date and have pear learn the lesson by making the same mistake in core. Once again the only solution is namespacing. Best regards, Marcus