the future of database packages in PEAR

Hi, My new job got me working with symfony. Quickly I found myself looking at Doctrine [1], which is the first alternative ORM that was implemented that can be run instead of Propel. Doctrine is pretty interesting. It looks quite solid. One of the reason for this is likely that the lead author choose to not reinvent the wheel where it was not necessary. For example he is basing a lot of his work on Hibernate and he is drawing heavily from the MDB2 code base. PEAR is currently lacking a PHP5 only PDO based database layer, so I talked to the author about the possibility of bringing Doctrine into PEAR. He was generally interested in looking into this. He uses a slightly different coding style, but his file structure matches PEAR. So this is something we could solve fairly quickly with a code beautifier. However in order to make a step like this worthwhile we goal must be to get new developers on the team. I talked to Mark about his plans for MDB2_Table. He looked at Doctrine and quickly pointed out that its missing handling for forms at the moment. The MDB2 port is also not yet complete and obviously Lorenzo is adding good stuff to MDB2 all the time. Optimistic locking is also currently missing. Documentation is there, but not 100% up to date. Of course PEAR will bring with it a lot more users, which will result in more edge bugs being found etc. So I think that all you people involved in the various PEAR database packages should really check out Doctrine and we should then decide if we want to base the future of database packages for PHP5 in PEAR on Doctrine or not. If you want to find out more about doctrine you should also visit the #doctrine channel in freenode. I would of course also take part in this effort. I have browsed through the source code once and I have done some shallow testing. But from talking to Konsta, the author, I am quite convinced that this is the right package to base our efforts on. regards, Lukas PS: Just to make it clear, at this point this is just an idea in my head, which the original author has agreed to explore. Just so that everybody is clear on who is driving this. [1] http://www.phpdoctrine.com/