Re: Re: Concerns about PEAR in PHP6

Pierre-Alain Joye wrote: >On Mon, 15 Aug 2005 21:19:25 -0700 >josh@bluga.net (Joshua Eichorn) wrote: > > > >>Today Pierre announced that he pulled PEAR from PHP6 branch >>(http://blog.thepimp.net/index.php/2005/08/16/13-php-60-and-pear). >> >>Now well this doesn't have an immediate impact it does concern me >>that a change this big wasn't even announced on this list. >> >>I realize its a lot of work, but if Pierre doesn't want to do it >>then it should be brought up here to give someone else a chance. >>Especially in infrastructure, PEAR should be about whats best for >>the community not what the maintainer feels like doing. >> >> > >I do not say that I do not want to do it anymore. The decision was >not not done on my own. It was announced on internals, as this is >for now an internal problem. > >The problem is that this request was standing for too long now. I >did not have any other choice than removing PEAR from php. > >Clarify the installation process sounds like the best way, I doubt >that you can get it back into php that soon. Obviously I will >continue to help on this part. But I will oppose any bundling >request in PHP for quiet a long period. > > Maybe, i missed a bit. But for as far I followed this thread, the problem is that currently the pear installer is only released with php releases. I don't see a problem with shipping an 'older' version of pear, or release new versions of it in between PHP releases. In an abstract way: 1. A package maintainer creates a release. The dep element in package.xml gets a new type 'pear-installer'. The package maintainer specifies his version of the pear-installer. This dependecy could also be added by the packager itself. 2. An end-user (developer) downloads the package 3. The pear-installer validates if the version is 'good' enough to install the package, if not the package could try to update the pear-installer itself to the lastest (stable) version. 4. Continue the installation of the package. The only problem that could arise is that the latest pear-installer package requires a newer version than the currently installed one. But that can be solved with upgrading to each intermediate version till the required (or latest) version is reached. Pear-installer versions could than be released without the loss of compability with the pear-installer shipped with PHP versions. The part about the pear (framework) packages released with PHP. I also think that these packages should be limited to a minimum. I second the idea to ship only pear/pecl packages required to run the pear-installer. After the installation of PHP itself, a system administrator needs to select the pear and/or pecl packages which are needed on that machine. (as you also do when installing a linux distro) Everyone has different needs and there are two ways to handle with that: 1. Ship as many packages as you can, or 2. keep the packages at a minimum and install additional packages. Just my 2 cents, Dave Mertens