Re: On technical debt

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Michael Gauthier <mike@silverorange.com> wrote: > 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 Yeah, well said. And I want to help with this as well. I think generally - we should apply the same standards to core which we apply to contributions through pepr. Otherwise, I don't think this will work out in the long run. Till