Re: On PEAR quality issues and natural selection

Lukas Smith <smith@backendmedia.com> wrote: > 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!)? Not to touch off another templates debate, but in the case of especially prominent libraries like Smarty, the question to consider may not be "what does PEAR have to offer Smarty?", but "What do PEAR users have to gain by PEAR including Smarty?" Plenty of books and articles out there refer to PEAR::DB and Smarty as a great team. It would be a much-improved user experience if the instructions for getting started using both were: pear install DB Smarty I know that I would prefer that, being a user of DB and Smarty. To that end, I've created a PEAR-friendly Smarty package ( see http://www.killersoft.com/packages/Smarty-2.6.2.tgz ) Currently there's a bug still lingering in the installer for absolute URLs ( see http://pear.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=249 ) that prohibits instructions that are not AS simple as the above ... pear install DB pear install http://www.killersoft.com/packages/Smarty-2.6.2.tgz Even that would be better than two completely different sets of installation instructions for the two libraries. Perhaps it's worth creating a proposal for the inclusion of prominent "non-PEAR" packages in the PEAR repository? That's my two cents on the competing packages debate -- ask not only whether a package duplicates another, but ask whether including a particular prominent package (whatever they may be, chosen by the existing voting system) is good for PEAR overall and may draw more users into the PEAR fold. -Clay -- Killersoft.com