Re: PEAR infrastructure for package distribution?

Hi, Mario Salzer wrote:

My first question therefore is, if PEAR is really meant as vendor- independent PHP package management system? The new channels feature seems to suggest that, but right now still only official PEAR.php.net packages are distributed this way. (apart from Horde maybe?)

PEAR can be used this way, some of our projects can be installed using PEAR: http://pear.php-tools.net/

While the PEAR manual contains useful notes for package authors, it doesn't explain the required work for setting up channels all too well. So I'm wondering if there is a premade PEAR channel package available anywhere (for static tarballs at best). Are the relevant parts from the PEAR.php.net website freely available from a CVS repository or so? There's Greg's PEAR_Server package as well as a frontend package by Davey. You'll find some links in a blog entry I wrote about our server: http://blog.php-tools.net/archives/120-All-new-pat-channel-server.html

Is it permissible to throw include scripts into the PEAR top level directory if a more correct categorization is lacking: -> require("some_random_class_name.php"); Or should vendor subdirectories (like Java) be added if classes and files could conflict with or disturb PEAR code? -> include("com/vendor/module/package/Whatever.php"); Of course we cannot enforce any rules on this, it's recommended to somehow prefix the packages, as PHP does not offer namespaces and so you can avoid conflicts.

Stephan