Re: PEAR's mission statement - let the fun begin

On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Gregory Beaver wrote:

I have asked Josh Eichorn, head developer of HTML_AJAX and co-head of PhpDocumentor to head up the start of an effort to clearly define PEAR's mission. At this point, we are simply at the stage of exploring ideas, a brainstorming session. Once all of the ideas are in a simple list, then a small task force will organize them, and attempt to prioritize them based on what you want, and what is possible with the current setup. Once we have a smaller list, it will be presented for discussion to all of you once again, hopefully resulting in a clear mission within the month. At this point I'll turn it over to Josh, and he will coordinate how we will gather your ideas.

Something I'm frustrated with about PEAR is although it seems to be well organized, it falls very short of Perl CPAN, which I believe is what PEAR is/was to be. With CPAN, 2-3 hours to be approved as a new developer, and 24 hours to approve a new project, with no silly form to try and decode (I understand why, but it seemed a little overcomplicated and was resolved with trial and error). With PEAR it is taking much longer, and there is so much less code available compared to CPAN. I suspect the reason some projects don't get posted to PEAR or don't make it past the draft stage is this lack of or delay in response. The half life of excitement for an idea for a library is maybe a few days. After that, either it got developed and is working and would take too much effort to force the project through the seemingly slow and arduous PEAR process, or the idea got mired in the PEAR process and lost steam. A library I wrote last night, following the coding standards and phpDoc stuff and includes a PHPUnit unit test, I would have hoped to be in PEAR already. I'm still waiting for my account to be created, and then I fear the whole "Draft/PEPr" process is going to take another 1-4 weeks. By then I'll have moved on, probably won't care about it being in PEAR, and the community loses out on some potentially useful software, written for FREE, and could have been available to benefit all. IMO PEAR's mission should be a mirror to CPAN -- easy installation of a myriad of useful modules. I think PEAR already has the infrastructure to be that, but the process for including new modules is too complex with too many steps and too many people (or people who don't seem very responsive in my experience, still in its infancy). Now given that I haven't been involved in PEAR as a developer at all before 2 days ago, please take my advice and opinion with that nice chunk of salt block. To sum up: "Long time user, first time caller. The PEAR PEPr process seems (or is) slow and arduous compared to CPAN." Beckman ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman@purplecow.com                             http://www.purplecow.com/

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