proposal to remove replacements in PEAR2

Hi all, After a lively discussion on IRC, I think we (Helgi, Josh, Chuck, Brett and I) may have a solution to the conundrum of using replacements in PEAR2 packages to locate data files and other non-php_dir files. The proposed solution is to eliminate the configurability of data_dir (meaning data_dir is always hard-coded at php_dir/data), and to add a new configurable location called www_dir. The reasoning behind this change is that data_dir is the only configuration variable used actively by the run-time programming code to locate non-PHP files, such as DB_DataObject's .ini files, HTML or JS files and so on. It is a best practice to keep all web frontend files in a separate location from your PHP files, to help avoid potential exploits by browsing to the library code, and so allowing www_dir to be a separate location solves this problem. www_dir is intended to make official the web_dir role created by the pearified.com/Role_Web package. What this will mean practically is that within code, one can always rely upon the data directory being in php_dir/data. If your package is PEAR2_Blah and you're in PEAR2/Blah.php, you can find the data.txt file via: $contents = file_get_contents(dirname(__FILE__) . '../data/PEAR2_Blah/data.txt'); This eliminates the need for any of the weird hacks I had proposed originally to locate data files for PEAR2. Comments? Does anyone actually NEED to be able to move data_dir to a different location for anything other than the need to have a separate www frontend? I will update the RFC on the wiki in 3 weeks to reflect this change if feedback is positive. Thanks, Greg