Re: PEAR a way forward

--On October 4, 2006 11:34:09 PM -0500 Greg Beaver <cellog@php.net> wrote: > Ideas that start as ideas have at best > limited success, and at worst a terrible track record of offending and > scaring off developers. Ideas that instead start as technical solutions > and implementations eliminate the need for ANY political discourse, and > make our lives better. I agree with your "track record" analysis. But I think *no* discourse at all is a bad idea -- thus my airing my ideas to test the water. You appear to be saying to me, "ok craig, if you love your idea, go build it and show it to us." ...and, hoping I haven't snipped too much of your reply to get to: > The fact is, a REAL political solution will come from a REAL technical > solution. This means: > 1) better hardware for pear.php.net > 2) easier development of the code running pear.php.net > 3) better collaboration tools at pear.php.net [snip] > #3 is also on its way, as we are looking at enterprise-level bug and > collaboration tools, including wiki or wiki-like tools to make this > possible. Once we have a real collaboration in place, it will be > possible to have PEPr-like voting on features, real roadmaps for the > PEAR project as well as packages, clear delineation of priorities, and > everything we need to organize our future. Here (your #3) I think you have the cart before the horse. You appear to have "collaboration happens" and then we store "knowledge". (I'm just tring to use one word to sum up all the things that will come out of the collaboration.) This implies that the collaboartion tools and the knowlege-storing system are one-and-the-same. Why shoot for that level of complexity out of the gate? And if we have better collaboration (we *do* have collaboration now), but we don't have a knowledge system... Well, that's exactly what we have now. My idea is not meant to be a "killer collaboration tool". My idea is a "knowledge system" -- a One True Library of PEAR knowledge. This would be more complicated than PEPr, but still reasonable to accomplish. Then, comfortable knowing that all decisions/knowledge will be safely (and openly) held... Discussion and collaboration will happen wherever; In mailing list, in wikis, in IRC or in new enterprise tools which I agree we need. I believe an emergent property of a good knowledge system will be forward progress on the larger, political topics. -craig