Re: dependencies and applications

Tomas V.V.Cox wrote:

Here's the problem: imagine another application is desired which depends

on version 3.0 of Tree, and phpDocumentor depends on 2.5. Upgrading to 3.0 would kill phpDocumentor, and the other app won't work with 2.5. The user is forced to wait for an upgrade to phpDocumentor in order to use the other application. Instead, he or she abandons PEAR in frustration.

This problem happens is normal in the open source world. It's easy to solve it, instead of releasing Tree version 3.0 when a major API changes, the point is to release Tree3 version 1.0. If minor API changes occur, you as maintainer who wanted to depend on other package, you have to adapt the code for the few changes.

So do I understand that we should release a new package named PhpDocumentor2 version 1.0? I'm pretty sure I've never seen this in the wild. MySQL 4.0 is not MySQL4 1.0, PHP 5.0 is not PHP5 1.0, etc.

I agree that at the moment we're just PER. Perhaps with the channel stuff we could "kill two birds at the same time" and support applications, well, not only applications but "distributions"

That sounds good :) Greg