Re: Re: implementing emeritus

Emeritus: one retired from professional life but permitted to retain as an honorary title the rank of the last office held Inactive: anyone or anything not in action or in operation or at work Which is more accurate in this case? If a developer is truly retired, this means they've left PEAR altogether. In this case, they should be mentioned in the documentation as an original author, and completely removed from the package.xml. package.xml is a live, dynamic document describing a single release in time, not an archive, otherwise the filelist tag would document the changes from a previous release, all the way back to the first release. If a developer is temporarily inactive, then I can see a need for the inactive role, but downgrading to "helper" would work just as well. Do we really need a new role? Nobody is going to email the helper for help unless everyone else is too lazy to reply. The problem is that a new feature is not necessary to solve the problem. The problem is simply that inactive developers wish to be noted as such, not that we wish to give honorary titles to the nearly dead :). Greg Klaus Guenther wrote:

Lukas Smith wrote:

So we expect developers to learn non developer related terms yet common developers terms are off limits, like "BC"?

I personally am not in favor of becoming excessively verbose. Things like BC, CS and MFH may need to be defined somewhere, but developers generally should understand them. We aren't writing for third-graders here. Developers tend to easily pick up frequently used terms. After all, even "php" isn't a commonly used word... but within the domain of web programming, it is not hard to remember. All the useful other acronyms and abreviations spring to mind: LASER, FAX, km, HTML, XML, etc. They are very commonly used -- enough so that they appear in dictionaries and often are no longer capitalized. I wouldn't want to be without them. In this case, the term "emeritus" will not appear anywhere except in package.xml, and then only when someone no longer wishes to actively participate in package development. It will be merely a matter of looking it up. Nothing complicated about that. And what if you use a word like "retired"? There are a number of other words that could conceivably be substituted depending on the level of English knowledge of the developer. So it will have to be looked up anyway. Where's the problem? Klaus