Re: Re: [metabase-dev] MDB news

> 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. I see your point and I would tend to agree. I don't think it is as radical as asking a right-handed person to become left-handed (or vice-versa) but i haven't been programming for ten years following the same rules either. Usually i find that the way i was writing things is not very readable so i change it. > 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. This would achieve package coherence which is very important. But what about PEAR coherence as a whole ? > 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. CPAN became very messy to me. There are a lot of packages which do the same things, i find it hard to know which one to use (take the bazillion date/time packages). Variety is good, but having a very loose set of rules would be welcoming anarchy imho. I find it a lot easier if all the packages follow the same rules, i don't have to spend much time because it is written in the same way. The rules that *could* be loosened are class and method names because they don't accept underscores. The rest of the rules are a good thing to me. Again, just my humble opinion. Arnaud.