Re: On PEAR quality issues and natural selection

On Apr 9, 2004, at 1:03 PM, Sérgio Carvalho wrote:

It's no secret that the fuel of open-source software is the pair ego/competition. There's enough ego here in pear. There's no competition, however. It's like trying to get a fire started with no oxygen.

Yes!

So, why not take the opportunity posed by the start of PEAR-QA to start a new era of PEAR? Pear has now sufficient visibility and critical mass to try and do two things: 1) Replicate the CPAN model. Relax the package acceptance rules, to basically contain code/test/documentation quality. Enforce these heavily. There's no excuse for a developer not to write good docs. 2) Fight complexity caused by over-numerous packages, by having PEAR-QA pick the best package per category. This should be done in a friendly dictatorship kind of way: selecting, say, the official DB package is prone for flame-war on lists, and would be extremely difficult to achieve a good solution on a mailing list. The process of replacing official packages should be laid out, but it can be done in the future.

One might even add (3) a public rating and comment system to mark a package's conformance to individual aspects of the PEAR standards. This would allow distribution of effort among all users to highlight what packages need attention, and PEAR-QA would have instant feedback on what packages are not compliant. -- Paul M. Jones Savant: the simple alternative to Smarty. http://phpsavant.com/