Re: 2009 Elections! Are YOU ready? | state of pear

Hi David, and all others, > >> Could you write up a short summary of what happened in the last > >> year, and what the group and the president did? > > Reason I'm asking for this is that I as a group member don't have > > the feeling that we did much. > That's ok :) I am going to reply with a lengthy and nice answer > tomorrow. I'm still waiting :) What I have got to say about the pear-group: I've been group member for two years now, and it was an usual job. In the first months after election, people are excited and many meetings are hold. This calms down quite a bit, and at the end of the electional year, there are no to very few meetings. This is fully fine. It is not that the group does have to decide about important or unimportant things every day or every year. It's few decisions that have to be made, and they are about a) opening accounts b) granting karma c) approving packages d) items that come only up once a year, like da) gsoc db) new server dc) pear2 standards and conventions dd) get pear2 started a, b and c is the main work that does not require frequent meetings. Other day-to-day issues are solved by the active developers that care for PEAR - be it setting up the new server, doing QA or helping newbies to get into PEAR. It's point d that calls for commitment and time to discuss the issues. In regards of dc and dd, we failed completely. The pear2 namespacing issue is open since at least a year, and the discussion did either not get started because nobody reacted to mails, or fell asleep after some discussion. Even creating and sending minutes of the meetings was unregular and a pain to get as they happened. There is another issue I see with PEAR: Lack of activity. Sure, there are new packages coming in now and then, and there is a bit of activity. But compared to the former, "golden" PEAR years, it's down to nothing. 30-40 people idle in #pear on efnet, and I am still often the only one to respond to user questions. We have few active people (Ken, David [izi], Daniel, Helgi, Laurent, and some others I forgot) on the lists and do things to maintain PEAR. PEAR is mainly maintenance now. That's a fact, but I don't think we are up to meet the requirements. The number of open bugs, once put down to 400 in a team effort, is at over 600 now. Many devs are listed as active but don't do anything, or only after getting poked by the QA team. Documentation still lacks docs for most packages. I worked hard and endless hours to get the new manual transformed to Docbook 5 so that we are able to use PHP's own DocBook renderer phd - with the result that it's easier than ever to compile and render the docs, but as a result we lost our translators and few doc contributors on the way. I don't know what happened to them, and I didn't ask them yet. All I see is that there is little to no activity on the pear-doc list. So to sum up: I don't think PEAR is dying; there are still enough people that keep it running. What we need to do is to adjust to the facts, and give QA and devs more rights for close packages. PEAR2 wants to solve that with collectives, and that is something we should adopt as fast as possible for PEAR itself. And about the group: There are some members that are very in active, and others that react a bit better and seem to care more. I'd like to see people in the group this year who care and who nag again and again until issues are resolved. We currently lack such persons, me included. Being a PEAR group member is no heroic, shiny task. It's a normal job that mostly gives you additional work that only few will honour. You only do it passionatly if you truly care about PEAR. About elections this year: Despite all the issues mentioned, I try to improve myself and throw myself in the voting ring a third time. I do not want to be nominated for presidency election; I lack the contacts and friends in php-core for that job. Despite that, my english for communications sucks. -- Regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen Christian Weiske -= Geeking around in the name of science since 1982 =-

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