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

On 11 May 2009, at 11:02, David Coallier wrote:

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).

For me it's not the design itself, but stale content. The first thing that user reads on PEAR website is amusing at best:

Hot off the Press [June 19, 2008]

And there's very strong stench of PHP4 everywhere. PHP4 has been kept alive for way too long, and it's officially dead now. And yet, core PEAR packages seem to favor PHP4 compatibility over PHP5 compatibility (PEAR was flooding me with warnings, some packages were failing completely, until I've removed E_STRICT from error_reporting in my php.ini). The documentation seems written for PHP4, and any mentions of PHP5 sound like it's something new and uncommon. My overall impression was that there's only choice between PEAR1 which is outdated and dead and PEAR2 which is unfinished and dead too (quote: "next release: 2.0.0dev1 in -552 days!!"). -- regards, Kornel