Re: The Nature of PEAR's Greatness

Arthur Hundiak wrote:

Scenario 1 A developer has gotten apache/mysql/php running on his linux box using his distribution tools. He reads an article about an awesome template system and types: pear install HTML_Template_Flexy Does the install work? Probably not. Good chance the PATH is not set, php or pear core classes are out of date, no permissions on the default install directory, package not yet formally released etc. All the issues can be fixed but it does take some expertise. Impatient, the developer pulls a class from phpclasses and sees that the instructions say "copy all the php files to xxx". Not nearly as good as pear install but it gets the developer going. An independent example of the same scenario: http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10268480 And of course there are plenty more on the mailing lists.

This example is quite valid, but it is (mostly) addressed by the "local" PEAR installation instructions.

    http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.shared.php

Obviously, end-users must be able to meet the system requirements for using PEAR to begin with, and the installation process itself may not be "great." That said, the installer itself is still a source of PEAR's greatness.

Scenario 2 Your pear based app has been developed locally and now it's time to deploy on your low cost shared host system. This particular system allows ssh access (jailshell) and runs php in "safe" mode. By now you have some expertise with the installer so you type: pear config-set php_dir $HOME/include/pear and get PEAR_Config::writeConfigFile fopen('/home/ahundiak/.pearrc','w') failed

To be honest I am not sure what my point is. It would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to fix these sort of problems. I guess that I am just trying to point out that there is a non-trivial barrier to getting started with using PEAR classes. And one should keep this in mind when pondering the future of PEAR.

"Getting started" then is not a source of greatness, but could be. Back to positive comments! What else is great about PEAR? -- Paul M. Jones Savant: the simple alternative to Smarty. http://phpsavant.com/