RE: [PEAR-DEV] The Nature of PEAR's Greatness

Tell the list, what do you think is great about PEAR? >* The installer is great. Let me reiterate that I think the installer is an awesome thing, just a little hard to catch onto. If you don't know it exists in the first place, its horrible, if you do then its a good thing. In fact very convienient. In fact now that I know there's a remote installer its my new best friend. >* Coding standards rock! And a moral obligation. I spend a great deal of time fielding begginer questions in various forums, so I can appreciate the coding standards, after having to deal with sloppy code all of the time. I just like the one true brace convention, which isn't a knock on the current convention, just personal taste, I find the PEAR convention hard to read. One isn't really any better than the other, but I should be afforded that much flexibility since it doesn't really hurt anything. I _can_ appreciate the no tab requirement, another issue I can see both sides on. >* Naming conventions rock! Rock on. >* I like the idea of a common error handling scheme. Its not necessarily a bad thing, but one that's difficult to upgrade. If everyone relies on the same error package then we're stuck with that error package for a good long time. Which was a point brought up when error_stack was in the proposal phase. As others have mentioned this won't be a problem with PHP5 and I'm looking forward to seeing error_stack as well. >* The categorization of classes, while it might use some work, is very >helpful. God help us without organization. >* The structure of classes (tests/, docs/, etc) is very useful Its OK. I don't think putting examples in a docs directory is very intuitive. A package should exist in the same directory. Just call me an advocate for the hopelessly stupid (certainly myself included from time to time). >* The peer review and commentary on code has been helpful to me in >particular (not necessarily the proposal process per se, but the >ongoing back-and-forth of good practice) Peer review helps us all to see with new eyes, this is a very positive thing. I hope that no one takes what I have to say as negative, opinions are as assholes... as the saying goes. There is a great deal of very useful code in PEAR, and a hell of a lot of people donating their personal time and or money to see it grow and become better. So PEAR _is_ a wonderful thing. So it needs a little work.. I think it has a pretty good group of folks to see it get there. Regards, Richard York