overprotective?

Hi, While playing around a bit with php5 visibility I noticed that in PEAR we mostly mark things either private or public. However I think people (including me) just got into the habit of doing so without good reason. Marking things private implies that classes that inherite from the class do not see any of the private properties/methods of their parent. This however is rarely the intention. http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.visibility.php It might be a good idea that we clean this up, especially as now in php5 only packages it will infact mean that extending is likely to be a pain and lead to code duplication. Then again the php5 only package authors might be a bit more sensitive to this as they might encounter this "problem" during development. regards, Lukas