Re: The Nature of PEAR's Greatness

From: "Paul M Jones" <pmjones@ciaweb.net> > OK, that's five people (with Arthur; I misplaced Stephan for a minute, > sorry :-). I really appreciate the way distribution is eased. Packaging and uploading is a breeze. I also appreciate the code quality. I trust people who know more than I do are developing their projects and there is peer review. I've seen numerous comments on PEAR-CVS regarding commits that were suboptimal. Things like that certainly help the community spirit. I used to look on hotscripts and other script repositories for code I could use in my projects. What I found was usually sub-par, and was a huge pain to modify for my purposes. Not to mention that a lot of it isn't OO. Once I found PEAR, I've rarely had to look elsewhere, unless I was looking for complete applications. Justin was absolutely right: reading the code in PEAR helped me become a better programmer. I lurked on the lists for about a year before even considering proposing my own package (and taking ownership of a couple). And I read the CVS commits and discussions. Without that, I'd not be as far as I am today. Something else that I really like is that there is a barrier for code that goes into PEAR. I had to propose my package (HTML_CSS) a couple times to get sufficient votes. And I must say, it helped me develop it better. Because if I don't get enough votes, or if enough people vote negatively, then I must be doing something wrong. And I really appreciate that kind of feedback. And if I need to completely rethink the package or think up better arguments why to use it, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it's American, but I believe that you can do anything you want to. Even if people climb up the ladder and cut of the rungs below them, it's still possible to get up. You just have to want to bad enough. So I don't have any sympathy for those who whine because their package wasn't accepted. But I also think that sometimes a good package has been rejected for insufficient causes. In those cases, the developer shouldn't give up, but should come back for more. Klaus