Re: On PEAR quality issues and natural selection

Hans Lellelid wrote:

1- I agree that PEAR needs to be more open. Criteria for allowing packages into PEAR should be based on code quality and existence of documentation alone. (I would say, no voting at all.) Trivial requirements need to be put aside and the image needs to change to a supporting, welcoming image -- rather than the current image of exclusivity.

There are places for this. We welcome competition. This includes repositories. So use those options.

2- Also, I think that PEAR package owners need to be "dethroned." The fact that a QA team is needed to be able to intervene & fix bugs, etc. is ridiculous. I think that it should be easy for developers to request "developer" status in a project and then fix bugs, etc. without checking at every step with the project owners.

As I said in a differnt post. Its not that trivial to just go and fix bugs. Usually the maintainer knows much better what implications a certain fix has and if the fix is inline with the roadmap.

3- I think the PEAR infrastructure needs improvement. The installer could use vast improvement -- as could the website. The documentation format is lousy & confusing (as others have pointed out). Adding bugs for packages could be much easier. Simply getting to package documentation from the package info page could be easier. In short, the site could really use some usability reworking.

Yup a new pearweb needs to be done. This is one of the reasons we created the pear-core@ list to enable all php.net projects to discuss the future. Documentation is being discussed on pear-doc. We have explored the option of moving to other (intermediary) formats etc.

In short, I think that PEAR should be a community more like sourceforge or tigris.org. Sure there are some basic requirements for adding a package (and PEAR could have more requirements like documentation, etc.), but it's not like you're not going to get approved if you have a legitimate proposal. If PEAR had a clear vision for what it aimed to provide, then this could be different, but it does not.

Err to state the obvious. Why should be duplicate sourcefore or tigris? I mean where is the value? 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