Re: On technical debt

On Mon, 2010-09-20 at 18:47 +0930, Daniel O'Connor wrote: > I know a lot of us know this, but I thought I'd share anyway: > http://petdance.com/perl/technical-debt/ > > Looking at pear as a whole; what would people say are the bigger debts > around? > I'd say pearweb and pear packages themselves are have fairly large technical debts. Only a few people understand how pearweb works and it is not documented. The PEAR code itself is confusing and sparsely documented. It's hard to comfortably work on either of these packages. The situation is somewhat improved with PEAR2Web and Pyrus; however those packages again have very little (or no) documentation and have code that is incredibly confusing to a newcomer (lots of use of magic methods). Additionally, neither package seems to follow established PEAR coding conventions. I can forsee them having large technical debts in the future. The bigger problem is there are not enough developers working on core-PEAR infrastructure. Because the code is confusing and undocumented, it's hard to attract volunteer developers. What I propose is that members of the PEAR community dedicate some time to cleaning up these packages and writing documentation. I think this will go a long way to ensuring PEAR stays healthy in the future. Cheers, Mike > Obviously we've got a bunch of tools @ > http://pear.php.net/qa/ which > identify a lot of debt; but what else is there? > > Packages that will never make the pear2 migration? ( > http://wiki.php.net/pear/packages/migration) > Failing tests? > Packages which are just plain bug magnets? > > What else?