Re: Changed goals

Hello, I agree and I do not, and the 2 ways were proposed both by me and Christian, with an advice to provide small patches to enhance/fix/whatever the current package. But technical issues, wheter it is good or not, were not the problem. There always exists a "better" way to do something, or with less bugs, more functionnalities, more efficient, adding a coffee machine, whatever else. I will try to explain my current feeling (and I may think I am not alone to feel it), take it carefully, add "imho" where you /want/that has/ to be, and read as a politacally correct text :-). PEAR is a wonderful project, and I cannot think a php world without it. Thus, while its popularity grows (that is a very good thing), we see more package proposals, more users, and more points of view. Sometimes that comes from "old dog" of OpenSource, usually no problem, they understand quite well as the things go and how to get something out of a discussion, providing all the necessary things and/or arguments. Maybe some huge discussions about how the cube can be a sphere, we like discussions. At others times, less constructive posts arise, destructive under some circumstances. A first approach is to explain the why and how the things are actually like that, and why this request is not possible as it is provided (that does not mean his request is wrong or useless), telling to the author of the post that exists around a big amount of users with hundred of applications. These users are not closed to the PEAR project, some are even not anymore in the company where the application fit, and as usual, the new person will trust the same thing about PEAR then the previous, he thinks"here we go for a safe upgrade", and shoots himself in the foot if we do not keep BC. For all of these reasons, the current PFC discussion, should be applied(i.e. locally for jail tests) to any PEAR package(btw, BC was mentioned or not ?) , at least the intention of doing it this way is here from the beginning, we all know how it is difficult to work on documentation, good tests procedure and supports besides our daily jobs and bug hunting. If the author does not want to follow the rules, there are tons of script hosts around the web, I always thought PEAR is not a CPAN/Hotscripts/webscripts/scriptshop, and does not aim to be. That's my closed own view about pear. For obvious reasons, it appears, in various ML lifetimes, some strong different opinions about how the things can go, or cannot go, this is a well known fact and I do not know any magic or occult sciences to skip these step, so no other way than accpept it :). But have I to accept anything ? Have I to break my own applications and many users applications ? Have I to accept to drop a current package I maitain and replace it with a new, BC broken packages, proposed with as bad words as I ever read in peardev ? Even if some PEAR member follow the author of the proposal, even in a not so nice way ? Definitively no! But it seems, some people think I am wrong, so why do we still contribute to PEAR in any way if we do not have any guarantee on how the thing will go, or even wrost, if we still get the maintainer status for these contributions ? That's may be what Christian and I feel, and hopefully, I hope we are both wrong, and more important, see Christian back to the scene! Well, this was an huge, and certainly useless text, but at least, that said. pierre