Re: Re: Play nice! Re: Savant/Flexy/Foo template engines

Hi, Hans, Good points all. I need to address a couple of them, though: On Jun 9, 2004, at 11:26 AM, Hans Lellelid wrote:

It sounds like everyone agrees that the best thing for PEAR would be to sit down and sketch out a lightweight system that can be extended with compiler functionality. ...

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of competing packages, but everyone seems to be in agreement that the best thing for PEAR would be to come up with a rock-solid template strategy.

I agree too. But. :-) There is no incentive for the current maintainers to agree to any unification strategy. They are free of competitive pressures (the "land grab" analogy) -- they are not confronted by any sort of risk or threat by not-responding to development-collaboration requests. Would Alan have voluntarily incorporated Savant-style code into Flexy, if the Savant proposal had not come up? Certainly he was not going to do it on his own; Savant has been around for a year now (and as everybody knows I have plugged it at every opportunity). Would he have done it in collaboration? Perhaps, but the end result would be something like the current CVS Flexy, not a simplified system like Savant; Alan, at the top of the PEAR hill, would dictate the end result, no matter how good the competing ideas or the reasons for a complete refactoring. As such, I believe that competitive pressures (as demonstrated by the Savant proposal and vote) are the best way to get unification: if every package is under threat of being overtaken by a competitor, every package maintainer has a strong incentive to collaborate, even if the collaborative package is not in PEAR. Without competition, there is no such incentive; developers can disregard new ideas with prejudicial abandon. (Is that what Alan and Lukas do? I don't think so, but others may have their own opinions.)

If you want to just propose a competing package, that's cool, but it certainly doesn't facilitate any bigger picture strategy. Lukas, I think you should be a stronger leader -- nay, dictator, of PEAR.

If that is to be the case, then we need to drop the voting on packages entirely; if there are to be dictators over acceptance, then package voting is a sham exercise.

A repository with clear goals of unification & cohesive software should not be driven democratically, IMO.

Yes, but then you get fewer contributors. Hard to have it both ways, unless a lot of contributors want to be code-monkeys doing exactly as commanded by their PEAR betters. And with that, the rest of the discussion leaves the realm of templates, per se, and enters the realm of social, management, and organizational issues in PEAR -- which, as I have said, are the primary problems with PEAR, and not the technical issues.

I fear that this will start many oppinionated emails, which isn't really my intent.

Well... ;-) -- 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: a collaborative online documentation system. http://wiki.ciaweb.net/yawiki/index.php?area=Yawiki Yawp: a single-file foundation for PHP applications. http://phpyawp.com/