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

One thing that people often complain about (at least people I know), is that you need to have PEAR installed (or have PEAR base classes embbeded) to use most of it's packages. If the problem was only related to directory structure and organization, this could be easily solved using some clever autoloader (like the one I saw for PEAR2), but there are many packages using PEAR base classes, thus making it a required dependency. I must admit that I've never examined really well classes like PEAR_Error and PEAR_Exception, but I'd like to know if they really add features that are interesting enough to make a package depend on them. I guess PHP user groups could be more involved in the documentation part, at least in "catching up" with some packages. That's something I'm going to discuss with our local PHP group (PHPSP - São Paulo), specially about translation. Another thing that could be improved is the "new developer's guide". I know that there are some RFCs in PEPr about it, but they are not cited in PEAR official documentation. I found myself a little bit lost when proposing my first package, but people here on the list were kindly available to offer some help. However, if we could clarify even more the proposal process and the "definition of done" for a new package (documentation, test coverage, examples, coding standards, etc), we could certainly attract more developers. However, if developers don't want to put their code in PEAR main channel, perhaps we could offer them a hand in setting up their own PEAR channels. This would make the PEAR package format even more popular. Just as an example: recently there was a proposal for a Mongo DB package, but the developer didn't want to comply with PEAR naming standards to respect the current users (http://news.php.net/php.pear.dev/51677). Maybe we should've demonstrated that there is an alternative and try to give some guidance in how to setup her own PEAR channel to distribute code. About PEAR2, I think it is still very underground. People that are not "active in the PHP scene" don't even have a clue about who's working on it or if there really is some actual code to take a look. Well, I think that's all I had to say... =)