Re: The Nature of PEAR's Greatness

On Apr 13, 2004, at 10:55 AM, Martin Jansen wrote:

On Tue Apr 13, 2004 at 05:3138PM +0200, Stephan Schmidt wrote:

I think you/we should put up an online survey and ask the real users of PEAR (not the developers), what they like about PEAR.

I still do not get it. Why in the world do you only want to know what people _like_ about PEAR?

The point, among other things, is to show that what the PEAR Group thinks is "good" is not necessarily what the developer-users think is "good." You can see, for example, that while the barrier-to-entry has relatively high marks, almost nobody likes the "one-package" rule. When we know what the customers like, we can work to improve those things instead of adding things they think are of little or negative value. This is also why I wanted to keep things "actively positive" -- any fool can criticize and not present solutions, but it takes some effort to find out what is really liked.

For me this only sounds like jazzing up the egos of PEAR developers.

Not really; you'll note that only one person (Ignatius) has mentioned any package by name. Everything else relates to the general tool set, consistency, and the community processes. Very little relates to the various administrative processes specifically, although some are highlighted (e.g., "peer review before entry" as versus the "one-package" rule).

Apart from that I'm not sure if a survey will help us a lot at the moment. People more or less know what needs to be improved.

I'm not sure everybody has the same idea on what needs to be improved; certainly PEAR Group has its ideas, but the user-developer customers may have different ones. PEAR Group is not the community, the community is the community. So, to bring us back on track (and the 48-hour PEAR Core / PEAR Group limit has expired, thanks for waiting guys :-) ... Martin, as a PEAR Group man, what do you actively like about PEAR? -- Paul M. Jones Savant: the simple alternative to Smarty. http://phpsavant.com/