Re: On PEAR quality issues and natural selection

Richard York wrote:

I was not getting defensive. I was more getting annoyed by this attitude . Docs in PEAR are severely lacking. However if you think that the docs for PHP itself have been written by the developers you are very wrong. Actually alot of developers were sort of hoping that opensourcing their apps would result in people helping them. However your attitude sounds more like with opensourcing they also have a responsibility to write docs. However making documentation a requirement inside PEAR (maybe even just for stable packages) is something that can be discussed however. It doesnt seem to follow in with the anything goes survival of the fittest theme that was also brought up in this thread.

Well I've always assumed that the creator of a package should be the one to document it, being as no one understands the ins and outs of that package better than him/her. This is something I've never understood! Why would someone bother contributing a package and then not document it?

Time. Also just because you can code doesnt mean that you can document. FInally documentation has a possibly lower barrier to entry so it is a good way to apply the resources as efficiently as possibly. However it is also often useful to have someone else document a package since the original developer doesnt know how it is to not know the package. So an "outsider" knows much better where the potential problems are in understanding how the package works.

Err I dont get it. So do you want to remove or expand the regulations?

The readability of code is important, of course, which is more common sense than regulation, that being said, just expanded. Its like saying "Thou Shalt not Kill".. its a moral obligation to post readable code. The no tab requirement seems silly to me also, since there are a multitude of text editors that can adjust those on the fly, convert them to spaces, etc. It also increases package size. (Just another thought)

Oh that one again. Please read the archives for tons of discussions on this topic. If you still feel you can provide new insights to this topic let us know.

I like David's ideas! I would be willing to contibute to enhancing the documentation, if I understood docbook and CVS et all.

You can contribute documentation in other formats. However we are also working on lowering the barier to entry to writing docs that can be directly integrated into the manual regards, Lukas Smith smith@backendmedia.com _______________________________ BackendMedia www.backendmedia.com berlin@backendmedia.com Linn Zwoch Smith GbR Pariser Str. 44 D-10707 Berlin Tel +49 30 83 22 50 00 Fax +49 30 83 22 50 07