Re: PEAR and PHP 5

On Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 07:01 AM, Stig S. Bakken wrote:

Each release may have several files associated. Today there is only one, but if/when we start distributing binary builds of PECL packages there will obviously be several. This could be done with the same approach. When you upload a PHP 4 package, the original, unmodified PHP 4 version is stored in one .tgz file, and a PHP 5 version with translated code in another. Which file you actually get when requesting "Foo-1.0.tgz" is determined by the "get" script on pear.php.net. If your installer says it's installing for PHP 5, it will be given the Foo-1.0.php5.tgz tarball instead. It could be done by the packager, but that gives us a much higher bugfix/new-feature latency for the code translation, since everyone have to upgrade the installer. Could cause a chicken-and-egg situation if we're not very careful. Doing it on the server means a single place to upgrade and re-formatting any packages that may have been bad.

I think you misunderstood me. I meant that it should be done by the packager when the author prepares a pear tarball for upload. Doing it automgaically on upload seems dangerous to me because you may end up with huge numbers of experimental revisions as people work around the (supposed) bugs/nuances in the translation system. The author should have a good and easy way of checking the translation of their code _before_ they upload it. The PECL problem is somewhat intractable, right? George