Re: question about PEAR vs. Zzoss installer

I'm +1 for adding such an optional parameter, if this doesn't lead to (technical) problems - e.g. when detecting if a package is installed or not etc. About the rules if or if not a pear-package might link to a non-pear- package: Maybe it would be good to generally disallow this for all packages in pear for the moment being - since I can't see why it should be needed. If discussions about an external dependeny being "absolutely necessary" we can still discuss if the other package might also be added/converted to pear, if there is a matching package in pear already (which should be a far better choice than an external dep) or if "in that special case" we allow an external dep. But generally I'm against allowing external deps in the first place. For packages that just use the pear-installer but are not part of pear adding this feature might result in a major improvement. Wasn't there a problem recently with dependencies on some Horde-packages? Stefan On 16 Aug 2003 at 14:53, Greg Beaver wrote: > Hi, > > Sandro mentioned a few enhancements to package.xml a while back. At > the time, it was too early to begin discussing most of them. Now that > things are rolling, I wonder if it is the right time to bring up one > suggestion that would affect dependencies. If an optional parameter > url could be provided, this would allow applications to depend on > packages that are hosted on other sites transparently. > > In other words, a <dep> tag might look like: > > <dep rel="has" type="pkg" > > url="http://www.phpdoc.org/Converters">XML_DocBook_peardoc2</dep> > > for another pearweb server (substitute Horde for horde packages, > another example) > > or > <dep rel="has" ver="1.2" type="pkg" > > url="http://www.phpdorks.net/MyPackage-1.2.tgz">MyPackage</dep> > > This change would benefit applications more than the current PEAR > structure, so maybe it is better to investigate adding an > application.xml dtd like the zzoss installer. > > The main issue that I can see this change bringing up is it would > allow PEAR packages to depend on external non-PEAR packages. I think > it would be sufficient to add to the CS that this is not legal, and > make it a human-enforced rule (i.e. releases that depend on external > packages could be annulled by the pear group), or PEAR could relax the > reins and allow this. Ultimately, my opinion is that allowing PEAR to > have the option of depending on external packages would be a good > thing, as it would encourage people to adopt the PEAR package manager > for installing applications, and probably draw in a large number of > new developers with interesting ideas, and move PEAR in a good > direction, even if it caused a few problems initially. > > This would also bring PEAR a little closer to being PEAR and not PER, > as Harry mentioned a short while ago ;)