Who actually says YES - Scott that is a great idea run with it, or NO
stop wasting yours and everybodies elses time ??
It's the community who decides. As Scott mentioned in an earlier
email, all the people who have a pearweb account vote on all issues.
If we are going to have a group created please make it one where people
have the power to say YES and in a timely manner, the trouble is it
takes too long to get a spark lit, most of the time you are left waiting
like a lemon with a sour taste brewing.
The problem here is that even if the PEAR group says YES, it doesn't
mean it gets into PEAR because of the possibility that the majority of
the non-PEAR group people say NO. However, this kind of situation
doesn't come often. If it does, then it's because of poor voting.
I havent got PEPr permissions and will not get them for just wanting to
start ideas, I.e. I really liked the competition idea to get the site
and concepts looked at by NON-PEAR people, I thought this was a
no-brainer - Bertrand disagreed and the idea seems to have been shelved.
The trouble is I cant just go ahead and do this as who is to say the
winner's ideas will be implemented, probably be a 6 month discussion as
to what colour to go for.
Everyone who wants to get involved in any open source projects seems
to have this notion that they need to have an "account" or "CVS
access" to contribute. All of us have felt like this at some stage or
the other. But then you realize that its not true at all. If you have
an idea, go ahead and implement it. If you can't just spend all the
time in doing that for fear of it not being implemented, then atleast
show a prototype.
Greg mentioned earlier that "Toby Schlitt wrote PEPr - and without
asking permission". That's a great example of how things work in a
community. Everybody respects code, long discussions that just talk:
not so much. I'm sure that ideas that has atleast been partly
implemented is _not_ going to be ignored.
My company has currently hacked nearly every Package we use, we have
multiple extensions for quickforms, templates, paging DO etc. I would
submit more patches but they just dont seem to get a response, so why
waste my time really.
Not a very helping attitude. PEAR just wont grow if it won't get those
patches. I don't understand what "trouble" you're facing. How long
does it take to file a bug at PEAR and attach the patch? Whether or
not the patch is actually attended to and accepted is a different
matter, which is what everyone is trying to solve.
It's not a waste of time if you send a patch to PEAR and people don't
notice. It will get noticed eventually, no worries.
I reckon OPEN PEAR up to allow people to do this. I see so many packages
where Coding Standards are not even applied - how they ever got past
this is a wonder, I thought this was one of the main issues PEAR stood for.
PEAR _is_ OPEN. Go ahead and hack away all you want on any package.
Submit a patch and I can guarantee it will be accepted if it's good.
When? That I cannot say. But it will. And given all the improvement
that everyone's talking about, that time-gap is all geared to get
shorter.
And which packages don't follow coding standards? AFAIK, getting a
package into PEAR is one of the toughest things in the PHP community
given that Rasmus hands out CVS accounts like candy. If a package is
in PEAR it means that atleast 5 PEAR developers have atleast taken a
glance at the source or run examples, and think its a good idea.
Is PEAR elitist seems to be a common question, but only a few know the
answer :)
I'm almost a nobody in PEAR, but I'm a PEAR developer nonetheless. And
I say PEAR is not elitist, PEAR just respects who code; they are
indeed the real contributors.
In the good words of Eric S. Raymond: "Shut Up And Show Them The Code!"
- Anant