Re: Re: PEAR2 standards: anything good at all?

Hi, Elizabeth Smith wrote:

It is claimed that unzip-and-go is a good thing. But let's think aloud: who is the target audience for unzip-and-go? I suppose these are the people * unable to use PEAR installer (those who don't *want* to set up a PEAR installer on the server may use its remote installation capabilities) * unable to set up their include_path (which is a pretty standard task among programming languages)

Actually it has a lot more to do with bundling PEAR packages inside larger applications than anything else. Yes I could make my app install PEAR (remotely or not - which means sending all the files needed for that with the app - overkill for a small PEAR package) or upgrade/downgrade current packages to match the version(s) my app expects or install a local PEAR (which doesn't work right on windows yet, BTW) and pray the user never does anything with his own PEAR install or include_path or creates their own module using other PEAR stuff that mucks up the include path or otherwise messes with my or their own PEAR install. Or I could move to using the pear installer to distribute my app when my users are use to unzip and run (not likely)... But it's a heck of a lot easier to just grab the package I want in my app, unzip it and include it, pack it in my release, and go.

First of all, many applications right now are bundling PEAR packages, so that is definitely possible. Next, unzip-and-go isn't required for making packages easier to bundle. I don't think that you'll have any problems with copying installed packages from the local PEAR installation (you have one, right?) to your application directory. Of course, there is a question of fixing paths within packages, but unzip-and-go isn't quite an answer for that, some better answers were proposed.