Re: Moving to a new PEAR website

Hi Michael, On 03.05.2011 18:44, Michael Gauthier wrote:

Maybe that's because no one uses the packages hosted there? What are the download stats for PEAR2? I can't imagine users not needing to read docs and report bugs, if such users did exist. I spent quite a bit of time myself digging around before I was able to run Pyrus on recent FreeBSD (detect_unicode problem).

Agreed. No one knows about them or uses them. How can we improve that without exposing PEAR2 more?

What do we gain if we suggest running pyrus.phar to users who wouldn't be able to run it due to an undocumented php config setting?

What config setting are you referring to?

detect_unicode, as mentioned above: [avb@www ~]$ uname -a FreeBSD www 8.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE #0: Thu Feb 17 02:41:51 UTC 2011 root@mason.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64 [avb@www ~]$ php -v PHP 5.3.5 (cli) (built: Feb 21 2011 14:33:13) Copyright (c) 1997-2010 The PHP Group Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies [avb@www ~]$ php -ddetect_unicode=1 pyrus.phar ??\sP?[avb@www ~]$ It is enabled by default, of course...

So instead of having one pretty and feature complete site we now have one pretty site and one feature-complete one.

Right, but who's going to work on pearweb? Odd maintenance tasks or bug fixes get done, but no one is actively developing the site, and no one has volunteered to do so.

I can ask the same question about pear2.php.net, the old site may be not pretty but it has probably several man-years of work. We need to have *very* good reasons to rewrite that from scratch rather than try to refactor/update. I already have an experience of rewriting a couple of big packages more-or-less from scratch, so the idea of complete rewrite of PEAR website frightens me. As you confirm yourself

To sum it up: this looks more like a default page of Pirum installation [2] than like pear.php.net

PEAR2Web is built on SimpleChannelServer which provided a feature set similar to Pirium. The intention is to add more features, but that's all that's supported at the moment.

pear2.php.net is basically pretty templates added to a SimpleChannelServer.

That's what the pear2 site tries to accomplish. Regarding the site switch, what are you most concerned about losing? - bug tracking - integrated docs

Mostly these two and also statistics. These are the tools I use as the developer, if PEAR doesn't want to provide them there is little sense to host projects on PEAR.

Would you be open to using the issue tracking provided by github? I also see download stats and integrated docs as important features (see integrated docs on the package details mockup in the link below). Those things aren't there now but they will be added.

I can definitely host code on github, use tracker on github. The next logical choice will be to setup my own channel with Pirum or SimpleChannelServer, rather than ask a PEAR group member to manually upload each new release of my package. I only fail to see how exactly this will help promoting PEAR2...

We could, for example, fairly easily include all the pear1 packages on the new site.

Why not the other way round? This will help promoting PEAR2 quite a bit.

The work to integrate PEAR1 packages in PEAR2Web is much smaller than integrating PEAR2 packages in pearweb. Again, I don't know who will do this work.

What does it take to integrate PEAR2 packages into pear.php.net? Why do we need a completely separate site in the first place?

There is no navigation on pear2 atm because those features don't exist. Designs exist for adding navigation that is similar to the pear1 site.

Where can we see it?

Sure, mockups are available at: http://stage2.silverorange.com/pearweb/work-gauthierm/www/

The navigation links at the top look too similar to "What is PEAR?" and "Download Pyrus" headings below... :[