Re: PEAR2 standards: anything good at all?

Hi, Philippe Jausions wrote:

Ok, let's assume, we get rid of all *_once calls in all PEAR2 packages, and force a user to go with either allfiles.php (for opcode cache environment only IMO) or an implementation (user-provided or PEAR-provided) of an autoload function. Given the above, how do we implement factory() methods in PEAR2 packages, especially in the cases of fallback drivers and/or optional dependencies? A lot of factory() methods currently test existence of classes in some way or another, and return PEAR_Error instances in case of failure. In other terms, would we forbid to pass FALSE to class_exists() in such factory() methods? Obviously, if we try to load a class that doesn't exists a fatal error will occur, which may not be a desirable behavior, specially for a factory() method. Submit sample code please :-)

Yeah, and while we are at it, there is that nice note in PHP manual: Note: Exceptions thrown in __autoload function cannot be caught in the catch block and results in a fatal error. http://ru2.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.autoload.php