Re: Mail_IMAP 2.0.0 alpha 1

Lukas Smith wrote:

Pierre-Alain Joye wrote:

On Tue, 6 Jul 2004 15:00:56 +0200 (CEST) tobias@schlitt.info (Tobias Schlitt) wrote:

As said before, I agree with your argumentation, but I still insist on forcing people to a common error handling method (let it be PEAR exceptions), to keep our usability level.

Am I the only one thinking that Exceptions are a specific """Error""" (let add as many quotes as you like) but an Error is not an Exception?? Thinking about having Exceptions raising everywhere sounds like my next biggest nightmare in PEAR ;-)

You are not alone. However it seems "we" are alone :-) The trend seems to be unstoppable. So I guess we need to adjust or move on.

I agree with both of you. And to be quite honest, I wonder if this isn't something the Group should decide because it has profound impact on the future development of PEAR. One thing that will put off a lot of users is the fact that they will need to try/catch every single call to a PEAR package. This is a misery I don't think we want to subject our users to. Also, exceptions raise the huge problem that adding a new type of exception will be a major BC break, while adding a warning or something that wouldn't die would not. A good portion of the beauty of PEAR is that the code is consistant. If we have umpteen different ways of handling errors (not to mention all the pain that throwing an exception in each method brings with it), PEAR will not have much of a future. After all, as Stephan pointed out, a lot of users use PEAR because they are not able to write solutions themselves. The sheer amount of QuickForm questions demonstrates this. Do we really want to go through the torture of explaining why an application dies unexpectedly? Granted, with exceptions you do have a bit more detail, but if people don't even know how to read the PEAR_Errors, who really thinks that they'll be able to do anything with exceptions. Consistancy is of utmost importance as well as keeping the interface simple. If it takes me a week to figure out a package's API (including all the exceptions that may be thrown), I'm probably going to hack together my own version. Even if my version lacks the finess and portability of the PEAR package. And just because exceptions exist doesn't mean that they should be overused. Just because guns can be used to shoot people doesn't mean you should get a gun and shoot people. Klaus