Re: Package Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer: Help offer

Hi Carsten, Carsten Schmitz wrote:

thank you for clearing that up. I applied for the subversion account since also Daniel O'Connor suggested I should.

Note though that I don't currently hold any office in PEAR, unlike David. So my opinion is strictly my own. Anyway, Daniel is the closest we currently have to a QA team, so you shouldn't have any further problems if he supports your application.

He also introduced me to Franck Lefevre, the other person interested to help on this, and who applied for this today/yesterday, too. I think with the current state of the package it would be already a massive improvement if Franck and me did the following steps at first: 1.) Move the current code base to subversion

It is already in Subversion: http://svn.php.net/viewvc/pear/packages/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer/trunk/

2.) Sort and categorize all available user patches (what's hot, what's not) 3.) Update the package to latest PEAR standards where applicable and apply patches

You may consider updating it to PHP5, it is still in beta stage and such a BC break is technically allowed without package renaming.

I don't think additional hoop jumping really helps on the tasks ahead :-)

Yep, and as the community didn't have resources to review the patches already attached to the bug tracker, I doubt it will find resources to review you patches either.

Alexey Borzov schrieb:

David Coallier wrote:

The PEAR Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer <http://pear.php.net/package/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer> packages has been inactive development-wise quite alot of time. I tried mailing the maintainers of the package, but never got an answer. There are patches waiting to be incorporated which are around for more than 3 years. (for an example see this URL: http://pear.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=1572#1149063438 ). The package was 'maintained' by these persons: * Xavier Noguer <http://pear.php.net/user/xnoguer> (lead, inactive) * Mika Tuupola <http://pear.php.net/user/tuupola> (developer, inactive) As you can see both are inactive. I am the development lead for a big Open Source project (namely LimeSurvey, http://www.limesurvey.org) and we are using the library inside our software. So I am interested to develop this package futher and I would like to be added as maintainer as this package. I have lots and lots of coding experience with PHP and would like to ask for permissione taking this one over (and maybe packages closely related to this). Thank you and I am looking forward to hear from you

Hey there, I just saw your SVN account request coming in but I was wondering, usually what we do is before approving SVN access we let the developers submit patches to opened bugs and this way the community will review your patches and make sure the quality of development is good enough. Let me know if you have any patches that you'd like the community to review and then usually after a few weeks, you don't need to request community reviews :)

David, we are talking here about the package with *the* highest number of open bugs: http://pear.php.net/bugs/stats.php?sort_by=Open&rev=1 I think proper welcoming procedure for a person who wants to maintain *that* is to kiss the proverbial dust under his feet, not ask him to jump through additional hoops. Also there is no *requirement* here http://pear.php.net/manual/en/newmaint.takingover.php for any community review. I for one welcome our new Excel_Writer overlord. Welcome, Carsten, and good luck --- you'll probably need a lot of it. :-D