Re: candidates for PEAR Group: why should we vote for you? Tell us your plans and your history

Hi, Greg Beaver wrote:

As we near the next election for PEAR Group and President, I'd like to ask all of the candidates to provide us with a brief history of their contributions to PEAR, and why we should vote for you.

As I wasn't a member of a PEAR Group before, it is a bit easier for me to respond to Greg's request: I only have to describe my plans as a member and not the stuff I did while being one. First of all, for those who aren't aware, I'm a long-time PEAR contributor, maintaining several packages with total download count of well over a million. My latest contribution is HTTP_Request2 package, which, while still marked as alpha, already has several dependent packages and sports almost 15K downloads. As for the stance on PEAR2 coding standards, my first and foremost priority is to prevent design decisions that will haunt us years afterwards. Remember the PEAR and PEAR_Error classes, that gave PEAR its (largely undeserved) reputation for "bloat"? Unfortunately the PEAR2 standards Greg linked to are plagued by just that kinds of issues, for example they effectively prevent splitting the package into smaller subpackages while keeping BC. Also they aim to work around deficiencies in a third-party tool (SVN), while working around PHP deficiencies already led us to PEAR and PEAR_Error classes fiasco mentioned above. I'd also like whatever standards we come up with to be short, clear and without useless nitpicking. E.g. my pet peeve in PEAR1 standards is whitespace counting (http://pear.php.net/pepr/pepr-proposal-show.php?id=580) which I'd like to address if I am elected into PEAR Group. Anyway, PEAR-the-project (or PEAR2) needs the following to survive and prosper: * Good publicity, * More developers. A major help in both of these areas would be a better PEAR website. I hope I'll be able to help with that.