Re: Package proposal misuse?

Ilia Alshanetsky wrote:

On August 12, 2003 03:46 pm, Davey wrote:

I find it hard to believe that 503 PEAR-DEVs can decide accurately what millions of people want. Also bring into the fact that theres maybe 50 people who ever actually vote on the ML, this just doesn't sit right with me.

Most successful projects are NOT a democracy, take Linux, FreeBSD, MPlayer, etc... The decisions are made by a SMALL and exclusive group of people, who's knowledge and abilities as well as familiarity with the project makes them ideal candidates to make such a decisions for millions and even tens of millions of users. Admittedly such a system does not always works, sometimes, albeit rarely, things slip through the cracks. For the most part it works quite well, filtering bloat, duplicity, etc... In PEAR we are fortunate enough to have over 500 developers and that number will probably increase with time. These developers have contributed to packages in various categories and in my mind are sufficiently capable of making such decisions. Even if not all 500 are avaliable to vote at any one time, we have more then enough people to allow for an informed decision.

The public is what makes PEAR, without anyone to actually use the scripts and promote their use etc, we may aswell not have it.

Very true, but adding broken or badly implemented packages will detract from the user experience and drive people. Keep in mind that poorly implemented packages would not only detract from people's satisfaction with PEAR, but PHP as well due to the close association between the two. Ilia

Ilia you are missing my point The point is that *no* package will be admitted without the required PEAR-DEVs votes The reason for public voting, is as a form of feedback *only* /me notes this is being discussed in #pear, it seems that quite a few of us are in agreement and just saying it differently. I agree with: Public votes do NOT get a package into PEAR, they are for feedback PEAR-DEV/GROUP votes DO get a package into PEAR I disagree with: Public votes should not be taken at all Just to make that clear. - Davey