Re: Communication solutions for PEAR / community

On 11/29/06, Daniel O'Connor <daniel.oconnor@gmail.com> wrote:

PEAR devs need to talk to each other.. we look like a kind of government now, also, if everyone doing pear packages (even if they used to be pear packages) should create some kind of trackbacks in order to be able to track every single packages that is pear'ified in order to prevent code duplication. I'm just pondering things - at work, we've set up a jabber server and it really helps us all communicate. Setting aside barriers like infrastructure, would a jabber (public, federated) server help the community? The idea of being a click away from talking to zend framework as well as the whole pear / php community is somewhat appealing. See http://framework.zend.com/wiki/display/ZFDEV/Wildfire+Jabber+Server Failing that, I know we have a not very talked about IRC channel. Why don't we more publically advertise it? I know there are issues with Stupid Questions (ie; ##php on freenode is chock full of them); but because there's a general steely silence whenever I enter the pear channel; I tend not to go there. I could handle Stupid Questions if I knew 50 - 70% of the pear community was going to be around, and I could simply ask a package maintainer about bug xyz... At the moment, only the True Hardcore Pear people float around there, which means that they are in general way too busy to help anyone. Very true, although, some people I have talked to on freenode often say things like "I am scared of efnet" or, "It's only crackers and script

kiddies on efnet", which is something totally false (even though there is some...). I do not think we **need** a jabber server, I believe with IRC we could achieve something very good. Although, to come back to the jabber server, something along those lines could be very cool, even just a room like #pear-dev or something, #pear-ideas whatever, but still, we need to publicize what we do, how we help.. we have to refactor PEAR's image (Because yes, there is a lot of bad sayings about PEAR) There is one other problem with helping people too easily, most people really just want spoonfeeding which is a big problem, and the solution to that would be making our documentation even better than what it is, so when we tell someone to read the *caugh*fine..*caugh* manual, they actually do find the information they need. Another thing we should do, is something like planet-php but for pear rss feeds, when someone posts news about PEAR, it's automatically agregated by the website (in occurence pear.php.net) and displayed in some pages like http://pear.php.net/otherlinks/ or something like this.. but of course, this is just an idea.