Re: Expect more!

On Fri, 14 Feb 2003, Lukas Smith wrote: > The biggest problem is that we have been lowering our expectations. As a side note I agree with Lukas that high level of quality is something we must maintain. I must say I don't consider all packages in PEAR high quality. IMO high quality is not only about coding standards or being bug free. Something that has been overlooked in some packages is _ease of use_ and _simplicity_ in general. Simplicity does not mean that the package should be small or have only few features. Take the PEAR DB for example, it's codebase is quite large, but it is _easy to use_ its API is simple and the overall design has been kept rather _simple_. That is why I consider DB as high quality code. Yes it might be slow but you can allways take some overhead away with opcode cache or friends. Then on the other hand there are a couple of packages which I would have liked to use, but despite the existing documentation I had really hard time to figure out how I was supposed to use them. Mostly because overly complicated API or too "clever" code. > I think it is vital that we don't let ourselves we overwhelmed by so > many packages. We have to remember that if the maintainer disappears and > none of the other developers takes over we will get all sorts of bad > publicity for PEAR. Like whatever happened to the Forum package? -- Mika Tuupola http://www.appelsiini.net/~tuupola/