Re: [PEPr] Comment on HTML::Template_Savant

Pepr wrote:

Lukas Smith (http://pear.php.net/user/lsmith) has commented on the proposal for HTML::Template_Savant. Comment: Well I wasnt saying that Savant should have the task of unifying the entire template section. I said I dont want another API in there. As such I suggested taking the Template engine most similar and using this as an API example. However I have been saying this for eons now. When you propose a package into PEAR you have to be aware of what came before. Even if what came before is not ideal it is important that we acknowledge the existance of what is there before and integrate the new things as much as possible.

The proposal specifically states what is different from all template systems already in PHP. This means that he did look at what came before.

This is something we ask of every maintainer (as in being open to merging in new functionality) as well as the proposer (as in being to mergining in their stuff). This is a core assumption.

Again I told you right at the beginning when you started working Savant that it is essentially Xipe with one less step.

And one more. Savant has some capabilities that Xipe doesn't have. So integrating it into Xipe would make it "heavier", and that's *not* the point of Savant.

It seems to be the case with Flexy as well. This is not how PEAR should work. Its nice to have a reference implementation, but now its time to integrate into PEAR.

I hope you understand the very fundamental difference between having Savant added to the template engine mix and adding a few functions to an existing one or even creating a new package that is called Foo_Lite following the API of template engine Foo which already is in PEAR.

As said before, it can't really be Foo_Lite as it both doesn't have things that other engines have and it has things that other engines don't have.

So in conclusion if we accept yet another template engine API into PEAR we might as well forget what PEAR currently stands for.

PEAR is supposed to allow for competing packages as long as they are different. Lots of people use Savant and it makes sense to me to have it as it *is* a very minimal templating engine. And as said in other comments, each of the other engines could even be extensions of Savant, which would be intereting. Now that I've said that, I'd like to say that I've never really liked Savant myself. It's very strange to me to add the extra assign / etc. syntax when you're just using PHP as your template as it is. If you're worried about a one-time compile (really...a one-time compile doesn't take that long. It's only O(1), which is negligible), you really shouldn't be using a template engine at all... but that's just my opinion.

Proposal information: http://pear.php.net/pepr/pepr-proposal-show.php?id=83

-- paperCrane <Justin Patrin>