Re: On PEAR quality issues and natural selection

On Apr 9, 2004, at 5:59 PM, Richard York wrote:

To be blunt, this is the only part of your post that I find a bit naive. Every single PHP application out there requires tons of installation tweaking. You have to tell it where to find its configuration, you have to set the configuration, if it requires other things, you have to provide them, and if you don't you'll get weird errors and won't know why.

And admitedly so, I guess where I was going with this is.. 1.) What needs tweaking isn't always obvious. Again, another area where documentation would help! 2.) There is no love for the naive on PEAR. One prime example is this, I once downloaded PHPDocumentor from PEAR, having no idea that it was set up to be installed explicitly by the PEAR installer. (Which I discovered later) Needless to say I spent several hours trying to correct file paths and other errors. Then I gave up and downloaded it from phpdoc.org, needless to say it installed flawlessly and worked beautifully, which is what I was trying to get at. Most downloaded packages you simply unzip and copy to a directory in the same form that it appears in the zipped directory. Such an approach is more idiotproof and fluid with respect to installing to a remote server.

I am not sure. You can already do that, simply download the package with the manual method http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.shared.php That said, I have to agree on the PHPDocumentor learning curve. Here is my concrete proposal: Let's set up a PHP Documentor "right install" in a remote server and allow PEAR developers to access it and generate their own Docs. I would be willing to put the server/space for this and open accounts (including SSH Access if needed) on the server. This might come handy to new PEAR Developers or someone not that expert on the PHPDocumentor generation system (and yes, I might fit within the non-experts). Regards, David Costa, Dotgeek.org

PHP-PostgreSQL Advocacy team     http://dotgeek.org

gurugeek att php dot net david at postgresql ddoot org $dsn = 'pgsql://world:most_advanced@localhost/open_source_database';