Re: Re: [metabase-dev] MDB news

Hello, On 09/07/2002 06:00 AM, Arnaud Limbourg wrote:

I don't know where you learned to program, but programming is not a beauty contest. If you don't like the style that is just your opinion because that does not stop the code to work consistently as it is documented. Anyway, if you insist that style is more important, let me tell you that I use one and only one style consistently. You may not like it, but it is everywhere the same.

To me that is exactly what people are trying to do in PEAR, that is to achieve consistency acroos all the packages. If people just committed packages without following the rules, it would become harder to understand the code since the style would be different in all of them. Of course, that is how i see things.

There are 3 kinds of people: those that want to use only the PEAR style, those that don't care and those that have their own style and permanently refuse to switch from that style to PEAR's or anything else. The reasons for these last kind of people are often very simple. Switching their style to anything else is like asking right handed people to start writing with the left hand. They become much less productive and discouraged to work with that style. They pretty much feel like not contributing because it is like completely giving up control for some other style that they hardly find it readable. What I once proposed to be more flexible and encourage any author to contribute, assuming that each contributor will become the lead developer, that developed would decided to keep his style and convert to PEAR style. All he had to do is to define what is his style and everybody interested to contribute to his package must abide to the original style. Coercing people to switch styles is often seen as an intention to take over the development of the contributor package and that certainly is something that many authors do not want. Until you understand this and PEAR rules become more flexible, you will always miss the contributions of many authors that are not willing to switch styles. The loss is for the whole PHP community. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos