Re: On PEAR quality issues and natural selection

Hi Richard, I do agree that there is a bit of KISS missing from PEAR, but I also feel that the focus of using the installer is a different kind of KISS from the old wild west download-and-run mentality. Once this is understood, I think the installer is quite an asset. I personally would love to hear more about what you feel should be clearer or improved. Maybe a package page on pearweb should note if the pear installer is required or not? Part of the reason phpDocumentor depends on PEAR is not because it uses it, but because to have it, you have to have the installer. This is probably not the most obvious way to let people know this :) Richard York wrote:

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)

Did you read the INSTALL file that is distributed with it? If so, then the lack of clarity as to the need for the pear installer is definitely our(my) fault.

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

This makes sense - the package was originally designed to be standalone. However, it comes at a price. The tarball is currently 2.6MB and growing. This is because it bundles Smarty, Cezpdf, HTML_TreeMenu etc. If you already have Smarty installed for one thing, you have to re-install it for this one, and on and on. Incidentally, one configuration difference between the phpdocumentor install at phpdoc.org is substantial. This sequence works out of the box on both windows and unix: $ pear install phpDocumentor $ phpdoc -h With phpdoc.org install, it's more like <download> <set path> (windows only) <edit phpdoc.bat to contain the path to php.exe> $ phpdoc -h And if you don't set the path, and don't edit phpdoc.bat, it gives you error messages. In addition phpdoc makedocs will generate the full manual if installed through PEAR, but won't work at all if run through phpdoc.org install, without some tweaking. Greg