Re: 2009 Elections! Are YOU ready? | state of 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. > I would suggest that we have too few resources to control this defect growth. 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. > +1 From my perspective, we need (conceptually) 1) archives.pear.php.net A separate instance of pearweb. If its a package that is being killed off, it ends up here. After a certain point, security fixes don't even get added. All of the documentation, etc is about How do I migrate from this package to something else? 2) brutal pruning of packages. Spreadsheet_Writer_Excel is dead. There are few replacements. No one can maintain the damned thing. It is just a bug magnet. The SOAP package used to be a little similar - it's also a bug magnet. Jan has been kind enough to step in and help us with some QA related stuff, and we've improved it; but the reality is it needs to go away, and we need to point users towards the PHP soap extension, which is maintained. 3) More tests! We've got some efforts around a pear wide test suite, and assorted tools to help make packages, etc. We need to close the looop between "unit tests say this package is broken" and users looking at a package to judge its quality. We need to add test cases for almost every bug that walks in the door. This way, new developers can come along and make changes more safely to a package. 4) A new planet pear. We have no community that is visible. planet pear was doing it, but it was dead. We need a replacement!