RE: [PEAR-DEV] Expect more!

> -----Original Message----- > From: Stuart Herbert [mailto:stuart@myrddraal.demon.co.uk] > Sent: Friday, February 14, 2003 4:07 PM > To: pear-dev@lists.php.net > Subject: 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. Okt hat points need to be clarified then: PEAR is not run by the php group. Actually there is few direct involvement by memembers of the php group, but then not as php group members but as normal developers. Everybody can participate in PEAR. And I am not arguing that this should change at all. I am just saying that we should focus on quality over quantity. Actually quantity has dangers that should not be ignored. It is hard for people to figure out which package to use. More bugs will show up with less developers there to fix them. Contributions will help less users, because they are distributed among more packages etc. > 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. Well roadmaps are published by developers on a per need basis. And I fear that in that respect we cant expect more. > 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. Well I don't think that these packages need to be in PEAR. They can use the PEAR installer even without the package being in PEAR. > 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. Well CPAN IMHO is chaos .. which does produce useable code, but is hard to work with. I don think that PEAR will ever be able to have the Java Community Process because it makes few sense to write RFC's if there are no paid developers that will then implement them. PEAR packages will come out of scratching an itch. But I think we should try to not have tons of packages that scratch the itch with some minor variation. Regards, Lukas