Re: General Questions

Ammar Ibrahim wrote:

Well, I'm trying to be an active PEAR member. Yesterday was day to remember for me :) NET_DNSBL was accepted, I wrote major parts of the package with Sebastian. Anyway, today I spent some time browsing the packages & the site, I compiled a list of questions: - Why are there packages marked stable when they don't have end user docs, even the auto generated API docs are non-sense( e.g. Text_Statistics )

Check the release date - the rules that affected Net_DNSBL are recent. Older releases are not affected by them, although newer releases of the same package will have to comply with the new rules. It's always harder to change entrenched problems in old code than it is to enforce them for new code.

- Some packages don't have any code released, not even in CVS.

These packages will most likely be either deleted or transferred to new maintainers if the condition persists. PEAR allows some time for people to get their junk together, but the QA group was created in part to deal with these issues.

- There are some issues that really shock me when I see them in PEAR, e.g. using double quotes for strings that contain no variables or special chars. This is not a CS issue, it's a performance issue. If using variables in a double quoted string, that's another story, a CS issue.

Although these are performance issues, they are tiny compared to the main bottlenecks in scripts (database connections, poor sql queries and no use of caching top the list). Feel free to open a bug report for any package that has an issue like this. An attached patch will make it even more likely to be fixed.

- The Main page for any package doesn't show the package dependencies. It shows a less relevant information, 'Packages that depend on package X' - Mainly end user documentation is really poor!

Most developers are not very good at this, it seems. PEAR has not yet figured out a good way to do documentation. Any ideas should be discussed on pear-doc (after browsing the mailling list archive to see what has already been tried)

- Is the source code of the PEAR's website open source? Where can I find it?

http://cvs.php.net/pearweb cvs -d :pserver:user@cvs.php.net:/repository co pearweb

- If you want to view the API documentation for some package, there's no way to go back to the main page, It's a minor naviagation issue.

Greg