Re: Request for features in PEAR 2.0 (codename Pyrus)

Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson wrote:

On 5/23/07, Tony Bibbs <tony@tonybibbs.com> wrote:

How about dependency checks for things outside of PHP? We've been pushing PEAR as a possible way to deploy our ASP.NET apps under Mono so that our Linux sysadmins don't have yet another way to manage application deployment. Being able to specify dependencies for non-PHP apps/libraries would help. Granted I'm not the expert on PEAR but the only useful dependency outside of PHP I can currently set is the OS

wouldn't we then be pushing into an area rpm and apt would out shine us easily ? :-)

Couldn't the same be said about Maven, Ant, make, etc., etc., when comparing phing? I still like using phing because I can add new functionality without having to mentally shift gears into another language. But couldn't this be handled by making your other dependencies other packages? I'm relatively sure that the installer is agnostic as to what it installs. If that's correct, then as long as the other things you want to depend on are distributed as PEAR packages you're good. Something that would be useful is the ability to have pre-install scripts that could run. Doing that, you could handle your dependencies by looking for your external apps/libraries in those scripts and fail to install if they weren't available. -Travis