Re: future of PEAR

On Nov 10, 2003, at 3:14 PM, Paul M Jones wrote:

On Monday, Nov 10, 2003, at 12:09 US/Central, Lukas Smith wrote:

The problem is not that we lack technical competence. The problem is that PEAR focused on building technical foundations and totally ignored build up a working community process. This of course is just as hard to fix as technical mistakes.

It is in fact harder in a lot of ways. It's like building a business (or more specifically a franchise model business). It requires more patience, more planning, more attention to the not-sexy not-fun stuff like requirements determination and documentation. It's fun and easy to "get started coding!" and not so fun to "get started documenting!". That is the challenge any serious form of PEAR2 would face, and not many are up for it.

Not only is documenting not particularly fun, convincing people to jump through your hoops is a major challenge. It's very easy for anything like that to deteriorate into a petty, non-functioning bureaucracy, Wading through many of the 'call for votes' threads on PEAR is like spending the day at the MVA (motor vehicles administration for those not from the US - one our most glorious bureaucracies). Automated verification takes care of much of this. If a package can be automatically verified, the rules used to do so seem much less capricious and the whole system is less prone to nepotism. George