Re: Moving to a new PEAR website

On 2011-05-04 14:35, Martin Jansen wrote:

On 03.05.11 16:23, Michael Gauthier wrote:

I feel like PEAR2 has a boot-strapping issue. No one contributes to PEAR2 infrastructure because no one uses PEAR2. No one uses PEAR2 because the infrastructure is not there. I thought moving the website would help this, but it could be the wrong decision. You also need to be enlightened to contribute to PEAR1. The process for contributing to PEAR1 has too much friction, and the existing docs are poorly written and difficult to find.

Not that it matters much, but I believe that the existing documentation enabled more people to contribute packages back in the day than a fancy UI design for the PEAR website. The manual may be poorly written from a native speaker's POV, but at least people get a general clue about how things work. Perhaps I was a bit harsh here. The largest problem with the PEAR docbook documentation is the organization. There's a deep hierarchy, and no search. It's hard to find what you're looking for unless you already know where to look. Many of the sections should be flattened into longer pages.

For people who are just getting started, not being able to locate the getting started documentation is a problem. Though PEAR did have a large number of contributions in the past, the number of contributors has dropped considerably. What are your thoughts on why contributions have dropped off and how we could bring them back up?

What I am wondering is if it would not be possible to merge PEAR 1 and PEAR 2 into a single web property? I doubt it would be much work to extend the manual so that each page was clearly marked as "This is for PEAR 1" or "This is for PEAR 2". And you folks could reuse the bug tracker, the package uploading infrastructure and probably even parts of PEPr. The pearweb code may be ugly and hard to maintain by today's standards, but it works and provides plenty of content. It is possible to merge PEAR1 and PEAR2 into a single web property. The problem is the PEAR1 website doesn't really have any maintainers right now, much less active developers to work on features.

As a side note, PEAR2 obviates the old package upload process. Contributors will release packages from the command-line. Cheers, Mike