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

> 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. I Agree. > > 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. > Actually there has been a few pear-group discussions about namespaces in the past year. Nothing seems to have reached to consensus for the standards as you point it out, but there has been some movement. > > 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. > I would have to say that the lack of activity is the result of bad press of many years ago. I have been going around in universities and barcamp for most of last year and had chats with people about PEAR. They have the usual same (bizare) reaction and they all say at first that "PEAR Sucks". This always brings me to asking them "why" they would think so? And fun enough, most people don't really know why they are saying this, they just are. So I am always brought back to explain how PEAR works now, how the quality of the code has improved over the past 4-5 years, etc. But I'd say that the lack of activity and hype could be well related to things like our website design. People find other "nicer" looking projects to work on (And believe me, I have heard this reason thus why I am mentioning it). > > 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. I believe you are right about being in maintenance mode. It's a shame but it is. That's why I believe PEAR2 will bring a reinvigorating strength to PEAR as it will cover new technologies, new and more up to date ways of working, new community involvement. I am very sad to not have seen PEAR2 move faster over the last year and as PHP 5.3 is coming to a stable release, I'd love to see a final push. > > 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. > That's a problem every open source project faces. This is something we have to overcome in the next year as it is killing us. Either we'll have to find companies to sponsor a few documentation writers in order to generate some enthusiasm or find a way to reward documentation writers. One way or the other, let's face it, writing documentation is boring and barely none likes doing it. Again, this is a strength that PEAR2's standards have that I feel we should push more. Can't make a package beta unless it's tested and documented. One will HAVE to have documentation written before it's avail through the public channel. > > 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. Good to know, I added you to the list :) So here's a list of things I think we should do in order to attract more people. They are only brainstorming ideas so bare with me please: - New design for the website (Get the group to finish the discussions on this matter) - Finding sponsors for tech writers (This is my job -- or will be if I am re-elected) - Putting even more emphasis on documentation including examples. - Get PEAR2 going (This includes getting tests written for Pyrus) - Fresh injection of passion is required in the group - Better planning for next year's GSoC (I will gracefully take the hit on that one) - More community involvement. That means getting the group to decide quicker on RFC and get the community to vote more and on a regular basis in order to keep the motivation level to a set point. - Collective effort to bring the bug count down again. There has been a lack of activity and a lack of motivation in PEAR thorough the last year and I believe that we have to sit down with the community and identify what has been boring our users out :) I really do believe it'll hurt but this is required and it'll be in PEAR's greatest interest on the long run. -- Slan, David