Re: On PEAR quality issues and natural selection

Tobias Schlitt wrote:

The way should be to loose the rule of "non duplicates" much more, but to keep it in mind. New packages which duplicate functionality must state, what the difference to existing ones is. An answer like "my method is named show() yours is named display()" would not be sufficient, but something like "my form package handles validation and stuff in one, yours is light weight and feature less" sound pretty good to me.

This has been our policy since I remember. I get tons of pear account requests to propose new packages. 50% of them are for packages which already exist. I send them a link to the existing package and tell them that if their package has a different approach I will open the account (note I am not evaluating this, I leave the decision to them). If its not then I suggest to contact the author to see if any thing in the proposers package might be added to the relevant existing PEAR package. Interestingly very few people seem to be going the route of contacting the original developers to merge in their improvements. Atleast it looks to me that way since I would expect to see new features being added to the existing package. So maybe we are naiv to be hoping for cooperation. However under these obervations the idea of every developer being allowed to modify any package seems even more naiv. In the end cooperation, the good faith of each maintainer are assumptions which are embedded in the DNA of the vision of PEAR from day one. I see us constantly growing, constantly improving. I also see us providing infrastructure to make it easier to create competing projects. For all of these reasons I fail to see a need for us to fundamentaly change how PEAR works. If you feel that PEAR is fundamentaly flawed we have all the infrastructure there for you to start your own project. And maybe some day that project will lso be under the php.net umbrella. For example it was mentioned in the thread that smarty is not in PEAR. However smarty has its own prominent place in the php.net world. What could we possibly offer them that they dont already have (especially since the installer can be used by any package in the world even today!)? 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