Re: Re: [metabase-dev] MDB news

Hello, On 09/14/2002 04:31 PM, Björn Schotte wrote:

So you can't compare these numbers.

I was not comparing any numbers because the PHP Classes site is not in any competition with PEAR, at least the way I see it.

Then why are you always referring to phpclasses and "Take a look at foobar at my superious site phpclasses"?

If I point to any classes in that site, those are mine, that I trust and use reliably to do things that certain packages of PEAR do not do. Actually I mostly only talk about Metabase because it provides unparalleled database portabily and schema management like no other package supports. It happens that the lack of portable database abstraction layer is often pointed as justification for many people to drop PHP for other languages that have it as standard like Java and Perl. If I push Metabase is because I care for the best for PHP. Too bad that some people do not want to see it that way.

This intensifies competition.

I don't intensify any competition because in my mind none exists.

I even have offered to promote PEAR in the PHP Classes site as I see

So if you really want to promote PEAR, why haven't you done it until today? You don't need special permission from the "PEAR el33333t". I think everybody will be happy if his/her work gets promoted on such a frequently visited site like phpclasses.upperdesign.com!

Because I proposed a banner exchange to be mutually beneficial. The banner space in the PHP Classes site is not free as in free beer. Doing banner exchanges with site with great interest for the PHP developers is something that I do from the early beginning of the site. Currently I do it with about 10 sites. It does not cost money and you give some promotion to get some promotion. It is a fair exchange. Only that way makes sense to me. As for PEAR, it would help getting acknowledgement that it lacks so badly. Just read the comp.lang.php thread and realize that one of the reasons pointed out by people that not use PEAR is because they do not know it.

[From "PHP Magazin" issue 1/2003 (released in December) we'll have a corner in each issue (thanks to Alex Merz). This corner will reach more than 20,000 people in the german speaking area. So not much difference to your 50,000 :-)]

I think you comparing oranges trees with the whole farm. You are talking about one people getting recognition for writing a column once every 3

We changed our frequency to 2 months because of the tremendous success.

I am happy for you.

[...] from authors from any part of the world and gives the equal chance to hundreds of effective contributors to get immediate recognition and feedback about the work they contribute.

This is the same as for PEAR, so what?

I don't think you see the difference. When a author has a class of his own published in the PHP Classes, he gets the immediate attention of tens of thousands of users that are eager to learn about new classes. When the files of a class are updated, all those that downloaded them before are notified so they can be kept upto date of classes of their interest. Also, popular classes feature in the top downloads pages providing further exposure. This works as a sweet compensation for the ego of the authors that contribute their work for free. PEAR does not provide any of this kind of opportunities to get immediate feedback and recognition because it was not meant to work that way. As user you may not understand how valuable this can be for the authors probably because you feel that authors have the duty to contribute their work for free because PHP is free. If you doubt the wonders that this can make to a open source software author, I suggest that you try it for yourself. Just try contribute with any class of yours and enjoy the feedback and recoginition that the PHP Classes site provides any author for free. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos