RE: [PEAR-DEV] Expect more!

Do excuse me for joining in, but as a long-time lurker on the list I do have an opinion which may, or may not, be of interest to you. Surely all of this comes down to just one question: What is PEAR? a) Is PEAR trying to be the CPAN on the PHP world, b) Is it a proprietry class library owned and controlled by the PHP group, c) or is it something else? At the moment, my perception - and the perception of other PHP developers I talk to - is that the answer is b). And it's not an answer that the developers I interact with like. You see, b) would be fine if there was a roadmap of some description. What functionality do developers need, and will PEAR fill that need? That would give it purpose, momentum - and perhaps give your average PHP developer a reason to use PEAR. It would also legitimise your rules and procedures that have been making such interesting conversation this week. At the moment, developers are coming to you looking for a). They've come up with classes that are useful for them (whether they're backwards compatible or not!) and are looking to share them. They're hitting your behaviour being more like b), and because you haven't met their expectations, you're going to get negative reactions. I think the PHP world needs a CPAN equivalent. It hasn't done Perl any harm ;-) It also needs an official class library set - one more professionally behaved and along similar lines to the Java Community Process. Just the thoughts of a lurker at large, Stu --