Date_Span and some initial observations

Hi... first off, thanks for all of the excellent work. I've been happily watching PEAR progress from the sidelines, and finding myself jumping into the fray, so to speak. As a developer who is just now starting to use (or attempting to use) PEAR in a serious way, I thought I might share my first impressions of PEAR. I've poked through the mailing list archives and have seen a lot of this discussed in the past, but I thought it might be useful to throw another data point into the mix. Quick background: Professional developer. Currently using C++ as main dev language, but am proficient in and have at least two years of professional experience in each of the following: C++, C, Java, and perl. Proficient in other languages as well, but those are my primary ones. Coming into PEAR, almost all of my first impressions are based in my experiences with CPAN, and to a much lesser extent, Horde. The overall experience has been positive. I've been impressed with most of the modules. The overall the APIs are, IMHO, well thought out and sensible. The code quality also seems to be pretty high in general. I have yet to experience any major issues with the code I've been using. The code itself tends to be descriptive and well commented on the functional level, again in general. So, overall a positive experience. The two negatives I have are package reliability and accessibility of documentation. The reliability of packages issue stems from my experiences with the Date package. This may not be a systemic problem, but for such a basic package, it is one a lot of first time developers will experience. Here's what happened: I had a need to do some date manipulations, so I decided to check out what PEAR had. I saw the Date module, and did a "pear install Date". As you might of guessed, pear downloaded and installed the broken Date-1.3.1beta package. I have pear set up so it claims that it will only download stable versions, but this seems not to have happened in this care (at least I think I do). Then I discovered that this package has been in this state for 4 months now. After reading the mailing list, I became even more disheartened to learn that this issue had been discussed several times, yet never fixed. By accessibility of documentation I mean that there is lots of good documentation, but it's not very easy to get at, IMHO. I tried to setup PHPDocumentor, but ended up with a web interface with so many options, I didn't know where to begin. I find myself digging through the source reading the comments just because I don't have the time to learn how to set up the document generation program. IMHO, the docs should be available immediately after the install command returns. The fact that CPAN modules have man pages installed and ready to go after install is a great example of this. Again, thanks for all the great work! I hope I will have time to contribute more back to such a great project then this email! - Sam