Re: exceptions

David Costa wrote:

Bashing will not help your argument. It will actually make the likelyhood you get taking seriously smaller. Bashing PEAR might however make you more expected outside of PEAR (they are a fair amount of people who feel its necessary todo so).

There will always be someone saying something like that about PEAR. I have read similar comments online yet I have seen few to say "let me help and let's improve X or Y". At the end of the day we have to please the users and to provide quality libraries. Pleasing every PHP developer it's really not the point on PEAR.

This argument is always brought out anytime someone makes a critique of PEAR. I think you're missing the point. No one (at least not me) is criticizing PEAR on the whole. What I was/am criticizing is an attitude and policies, these are not things that could be addressed in a more "constructive" way by sitting down and writing documentation. Let me rephrase my criticism in what is apparently the too-rarely-used "constructive" way: Let's improve PEAR's policy on Exceptions, because it's reactionary and will not be what people want in 6mo-1yr when PHP5 is everywhere. The current policy that exceptions are for replacing PEAR_ERROR_DIE might as well be a policy that says "don't use exceptiosn". This seems to be grounded in little real-world use, much speculation, and just a little bit of old-fashioned fear of change. Exceptions should replace any & every use of PEAR_Error [for PHP5-only packages, of course]. Warnings may need to be handled by some construct, but errors are exceptions ... same thing. I care about this because I use PEAR classes & I'd like to see more PEAR tools become solutions for people doing PHP5 development. Also, I'm going to be creating some PHP5 versions of some PEAR packages. I'm doing this because without Exceptions these classes are useless to me in a PHP5 framework. Other OO things also get easier in PHP5. I'd be happy to contribute these back to PEAR, of course, though it seems from current discussion that these would be rather unwelcome. Hans