Re: On technical debt

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 3:51 AM, till <till@php.net> wrote: > 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. > > > And worse, all of the unit tests are very fragile for pearweb; relying on layout :( I don't think that we'll ever get pearweb to a state we're happy with - it uses too many different database abstraction layers, templating systems, etc. PEAR core; agreed - it's nearly incomprehensible to me when I've gone diving in. I mean, I can find specific bugs and stomp on them; but often I just have to stare at code to work out what it's doing. A lot of it feels needlessly complex, and not exactly self documenting - I can't get a great feel for the core. Since the core classes are mainly used only by the installer, a lot of the design that is in there isn't as thought out at something more generically used (say, HTTP_Request2). The best way to resolve that is to write a load of unit test coverage, focus on mocking things out, etc. I have no idea of the state of pyrus to say if this holds true for it as well.