Re: Re: Forking PEAR

I too would be interested in helping. I have my own selfish reasons and rather than sit-and-wait, if someone can divy up some tasks to those who have volunteered then sign me up. If this has been taken off-list please add me to the thread... --Tony Greg Beaver wrote:

Hans Lellelid wrote:

Mostly, why *haven't* channels been implemented yet? Is it a matter of needing more developers to contribute time? Is there a technical limitation? It seems PEAR needs a solution now because PHP5 is stable & PEAR is just going to become a mess of PHP4/PHP5 packages (e.g. what happens when someone backports Net_GeoIP to PHP4?....Net_GeoIP0? Net_GeoIP2?).

The CVS of the PEAR installer has all of my back-breaking sweat in the form of channels support. It is not perfect, nor even alpha quality yet. The next stage of implementation is to finish the validation class that will standardize validation of things like version numbering, package naming, etc. but will be easily extendable by other channels. However, the largest element missing is an easily installable server that supports channels. As I've said, I'm working on a php4-based server but I am 1 person who happens to have an insanely busy touring schedule as a professional musician, so things are a bit slow right now. My schedule does clear up dramatically at the end of August for a few months, and this will make a difference then. Yes, it is exclusively a matter of developers with time *and interest*. Let's be honest - everyone has time if they are really interested in something. I have been pushing the idea of channels, and then when consensus started to be reached, I coded the thing. It's taken a ridiculous amount of time and energy to get it even as far as where it is now. I run PEAR 1.4.0dev8 as my primary installer here, so it works for all basic tasks, but there are still some issues, such as how to ensure that the registry is updated when you run pear upgrade pear (I have my ideas, it will probably involve hard-coding the supported protocols of pear.php.net so that a registry entry is unnecessary, at least in the first few versions). Greg