Re: Forking PEAR

Hi, Heino H. Gehlsen wrote:

The current endless discussions proves to me, that some serious decisions have to be made, and considering some of the inexperienced opinions on this list I'd say, that every single opinion shouldn't always be taken into account at all times - perhaps people should simply keep quiet when they know not of what they speak (e.g. recent discussions about exceptions and protected)

On what do you base your judgement? I've been expressing my opinion on exceptions and I'm against using them at the current point. But this has nothing to do with my knowledge about exceptions, but my knowledge about the users of PEAR. I'm not only maintaining PEAR packages, but also working on php-tools.net for three years now and get a lot of feedback from the users of my packages. I'm sure that a lot of people will be having a hard time adjusting to exceptions and this will take a while. Furthermore I'm working for Europe's largest ISP and they just switched to PHP4.3 about one month ago. So it will surely take some time, till the standard PHP developer will be able to use PHP5 only packages. And I'm currently lead developer of ~12 packages, so it's not like I'm here to express stupid opinions, I prefer maintaining my packages over endless discussions. I have to admit that I feel a little insulted by Hans and you if you supress my arguements by writing that I wouldn't have enough knowledge about PHP5 or exceptions. If I develop something, that does not fit into PEAR I'm not all "PEAR must change", I just put it on php-tools.net as I can do what I want, there... That's the case for patTemplate, as I did not want another flame war on templating engines. PEAR is huge, and huge things tend to change slowly. PHP5 took 2 years, why do we have to change in 1 month? I certainly embrace PHP5 with all its features and I will be playing with it as I did since beta1 (in fact I'm currently developing a PHP5 only PECL extensions), but I don't think that we should rush things with PEAR, as PEAR is mainly about stability. I had several problems with BC breaks in packages and I'm really grateful that people like Lukas and Greg are putting effort into keeping PEAR compatible with older versions. Surely Greg could have been implementing channels a lot faster, if he did not care about keeping the installer compatible with pre-channel versions. I will not take part this discussion, as I got more pressing things to do, I just wanted to express my views on these topics. Stephan