Re: Forking PEAR

David Costa wrote:

So the whole argument in my opinion is just flawed and based upon false assumptions. Everyone is talking about what is he doing and how hard is to cope, well I have been working on PHP 5 packages and we both know that the majority of hosts /settings won't run under E_STRICT anyway and so you can run your application safely. You can't expect all the packages to be ported to PHP 5 after two days.

Not really. But I would contribute and do my best to get the packages I need to PHP5. That's what it's about, eh? Contributing...

Yeah, me too. I'd be happy, for example, to contribute & maintain (i.e. apply changes that are applied to PHP4 version) my PHP5/E_STRICT version of Log or Mail_Mbox or Mail_MimeDecode.

In the moment the only people satisfied are these sticking to PHP4. But what do you think new developers will think when they want to develop a PHP5-app? PEAR won't be of any use to them. Because the majority is PHP4-only.

I don't think anyone wants to stick with PHP 4 for the sake of it. There are some developers who prefer to work on PHP 5 when it will be widely adopted and seems very reasonable to me ;) Don't get me wrong, I see your point but the forking will be a total waste of time, resources etc.

Well, I disagree, David. I think everyone agrees that PHP4 will be around in some shepe or form for some time. I think everyone also agrees that because PHP4 packages won't runin E_STRICT, that PHP5-only packages need to be welcomed. There's currently no way to handle a backport of a PHP5 package to PHP4. Having some sort of channel system will not only address this issue today, but it will address the same problem when PHP5.1 hits & (hopefully!) something like namespaces becomes available, or PHP6 when PHP apps are compiled using a JDK ;) No one's trying to change the world here. PEAR is not dealing well with change, and I think that a big part of teh problem is the fact that it is not technologically equipped to deal with change. Hans