Re: Re: [metabase-dev] MDB news

Hello, On 09/07/2002 06:42 PM, Arnaud Limbourg wrote:

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.

Try to understand that you will never get people to agree on one style that is good. It is unrealistic to ask everybody to switch to a particular style, especially if they always used a single style for many years consistently. If you switched to a style that you agreed that was better, good for you. You can't just expect that will happen with everybody, especially those that are using another style for a long time.

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 ?

I think the goal of attracting more capable people to contribute will useful and rock solid components to PEAR is more important than remaining unflexible and pushing only one style for adoption for everybody because that simply will never happen and the whole PHP community looses opportunities.

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.

Keep up those demands on style will always keep out many capable programmers from contributing. The truth is that there is not a single way to certain things right.

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.

Your opinion is not based on very humble principles. While it is a good thing that more capable developers contribute to PEAR, you insist on pushing unrealistic requirements as if having other developers to contribute would be like you were doing them a favor. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos