Re: Ethics of competing proposals

Clay Loveless wrote:

That said, the series of events above looks a lot like Joshua not liking the look of an AJAX package in PEAR, and also Joshua realizing that despite his rep as a PHP+AJAX authority, a PEAR implementation of AJAX is in proposal state that he's not associated with. What follows just seems like using established rep to bully a package proposer into (almost) backing off. All relatively cordial in its exchanges, but still seems a lot like bullying.

Having worked with Josh for many years, I can provide a helpful interpretation of what is going on here. First of all, Josh doesn't care about competition between developers. When I tell him I think his code sucks, if I can back up the assertion with good logic and an alternative, there is simply no debate. The only question in phpDocumentor development has been getting the best solution in there. On the other side, he's not afraid to challenge even my most central ideas if they aren't good. This is all just a question of getting the best code solution and cooperating gingerly between two developers who don't know each other approaching the same problem with different solutions. The basic problem as I see it is that PEAR has historically had an author-centric bias, rather than a code-centric bias. In other words, the first-come-first-served approach best serves the egos of authors, but not necessarily the needs of end-users, who instead wish to have the most stable, easy-to-use code. As the XML_RPC2 stuff (prior to the call for votes, sigh...) showed, sometimes better code does result from clashing horns together, and the developers still can even get along with each other in the end :). Greg