Re: About the Group (was "Proposal Finished Console_Getargs")

Hi, David,

I dont know why everyone assumes that the group has evil intent instead of if there might have been another more plausible reason.

Regardless of how benevolent it may be in fact, all government is assumed to be "in it for itself" by default. The only remedy for this is preemptive transparency and obsessive communication (on an hourly basis if needed) about the reasons behind, options for, and methods of decision-making. It's nothing against PEAR Group per se, but I think most open-source developers have an innate distrust of authority ("power corrupts" and all that ;-).

Not really. I trust that before joining PEAR every developer read read http://pear.php.net/group/ There is a PHP Group too BTW. Obsessive communication on an hourly basis is NOT something you can demand from volunteers. This is not a full time job.

Fair enough. All I am saying is that if PEAR Group feels it is not trusted by the devs, this is one reason why that might be the case.

The distrust of authority is, excuse me, BS. This was first raised by Alexey and again, it is BS. You don't trust/like PEAR ? then you have a problem, not the PEAR Group.

Guilty as charged. :-) But I think more than one developer on the list feels this way; it is really just me? I suppose it wouldn't be the first time... ;-)

Unless you or anyone else has a proof of any wrongdoing by the Group, these are just useless words which will have no other result then upsetting people like Lukas that donated their own time to make PEAR better.

I guess my point is the "perception" of PEAR Group, not the actual performance of the Group. If they are perceived as no-good, then that's a battle they will have to continue to fight over and over until the perception changes. The suggestions I made are about how PEAR Group can change how devs see it. (Granted that some devs like the Group, some don't like it, some ignore it.) Active marketing, as it were, of how the Group is good, can only help to improve how they are perceived.

Anyways I think its becoming pointless if everybody thinks that the group is just some inner circle on a power trip.

If it reserves a veto for itself, that sounds like a power trip. It's poor advertising; you might not actually use it, but having it just looks bad. The circumstances under which veto may be applied are not spelled out; it's like having a law that says "the police may take your car away from you" without saying when, how, or why, and what recourse you might have.

It's not a power trip, it is clearly stated on http://pear.php.net/manual/en/developers.contributing.howto.php " The registration process is quite straightforward: Fill out the form on this site and submit the information. After you have done that, the PEAR Group has to finally approve your submission. " I don't really understand why people submit a package proposal under a set of binding rules and then complain about these rules.

Agreed, but that doesn't address the veto power. Let us say that I submit a new template engine ;-) and it gets voted in massively, even though the informal undocumented policy from the Group is "no more template engines." Would the Group exercise its veto at that point? I don't know, there's no written documentation on that. There's nothing that states what the "Group approval" rules are. If there are no rules, and it is mostly arbitrary, then the voting process is more vetting than voting, and more opiate than action. Again, my point is about perception. In some cases, perception is reality. The perception of a power trip equates to less trust, at least to some developers. I'm not angry, here, I just see the "trust" issue raised by Group members who don't seem to understand why some devs might not be happy. My posts address some of the possible reasons. Whether the Group is actually concerned about it, well, that's something else entirely. ;-) xxoo, Jones the Ogre -- Paul M. Jones Savant: the simple alternative to Smarty for PHP. http://phpsavant.com/ DB_Table: build RDBMS tables and XHTML forms in one PHP class. http://wiki.ciaweb.net/yawiki/index.php?area=DB_Table Yawiki: your collaborative online documentation system. http://wiki.ciaweb.net/yawiki/index.php?area=Yawiki