Re: practical concerns for moving PEAR forward

A question: Why doesn't pear have any why-you-should-use-pear propaganda? To get to the meat of this email, head towards the bottom; the bit with dotpoints... To illustrate: There are a number of great packages to use; but as a first time visitor I have to navigate in three links deep to find: https://pear.php.net/manual/en/introduction.php Which mentions a whole lot of stuff that sounds great, but no actual links to packages it mentions on that page. I get to a package page, and most don't have good end user documentation - take a look at PHP_CompatInfo (https://pear.php.net/package/PHP_CompatInfo/ ). The front page says:

PHP_CompatInfo will parse a file/folder/script/array to find out the minimum version and extensions required for it to run. Features advanced debug output which shows which functions require which version and CLI output script

To which I think "awesome. Show me! I would really love to use that...". I look at the documentation link. There's no end user documentation :/ Okay; look at the phpdocs https://pear.php.net/package/PHP_CompatInfo/docs/latest/ Uhm. Where do I start? *Welcome to PHP_CompatInfo!* This documentation was generated by phpDocumentor v1.2.3<http://www.phpdoc.org/> Maybe one of these files links on the side... oh heck; I'm quickly lost. The files don't offer a view of the source code, nor can I get back to the package itself. Now what? Give up and google for something else? Oh; wait: external package homepage! http://www.laurent-laville.org/index.php?module=pear&desc=pci&action=examples Net result: pearweb got somewhat in the way of getting to the information I needed. :( I think that if we are going to redo parts of pearweb; we should think about focusing on - An easier way to view the source, examples, what have you of a package. - An even easier way to maintain this information. - A method for highlighting packages which are particularly useful for common tasks - MDB2, HTML_Quickform, etc. If a package is highly downloaded, and documentation, etc is pretty good on it; promote it a little. - On most package pages; put how you install the darned thing. pear install -f PHP_CompatInfo - too easy; but if you've never used pear before, how confusing. - A section for related packages links. If I don't like MDB2; but I'm still looking at DB abstraction; I might be interested in PDO, PEAR::DB, ADODB, Zend_DB, or many, many others. If I stop thinking of pearweb as 'a place with one solution for my problem' and start thinking 'pearweb helps me solve my problems'; i'm more likely to return to pearweb over and over. Also; it might be worth suggesting really quick mockups of how some sections (UI) could be redone - many of the things I just mentioned are easy to see in a picture; not so much with a bunch of words.