Re: Re: [metabase-dev] MDB news

Hello there, Manuel Lemos wrote:

On 09/16/2002 04:45 AM, Björn Schotte wrote:

And because PEAR is "sanctioned by the PHP Group" or comes officially with the PHP distribution, there's a huge liability of PEAR and its developers to produce code/packages with a good *quality* in mind.

It is very naive of you to think that a single code standard assures any quality. If you talked to me about quality assurance procedures like tests that prove that the API work as documented I would agree. As for style, any package may have many bugs and design flaws regardless of the style they use. Style is about looks, not brains.

But I don't think you can deny that a general coding and structure style throughout packages in a library helps getting a better overview at quality. Instead of getting accustomed to like 10 styles you only need to 'learn' one.

You are only talking about *quantity*. On the one hand it is right (i.e. to be accepted you need many packages), on the other hand not because PEAR should be of a good quality. And coding standards are one point where good quality counts.

You need to learn a little more about statistics. Sure if the rules are loosen, people with different levels of programming skills wil contribute. OTOH, you are not stopping better qualified authors from contributing. That is the problem of PEAR. A lot of the qualified developers do not contribute because PEAR rules make it unviable.

In comparison to the huge pile of packages on the PHP Classes site I think it is not that bad to have a somewhat higher burden. Any qualified user should be able to change his style/structure to PEAR's within an hour (depending on size of course)... (otherwise I wouldn't call it a qualified author).

Which fat base classes do you mean? And what does "fat" in your eyes mean?

I am talking about PEAR base classes, what else? Since they are required to be the base class for the other PEAR classes, they all add a bunch of variables and functions to all derived classes. I don't know if you are aware, but PHP objects are indeed made of associative arrays. This means that every time you create an object, you need to initialize the whole associative array adding their entries one by one. Also to access a object class member, PHP needs to do associative array lookup using the member name as key.

Do you have a better idea?

As you probably may understand by now this adds a needless overhead to object initialization and access that gets worse as the number of variables and functions increases. So, adding fat base classes is generatlly not a good idea, especially in PHP. Too bad most people are not aware or else they would probably rethink their class design.

sure, blame Andi for being incapable..

Yep. But don't you see that this is a *WRONG* attitude? If you WANT TO USE other things, YOU have to adapt to their styles.

You are not getting it. He does not want to adapt, so he will not use it. It may be wrong from your point of view, but he his the one to decide that is worthy to adapt.

Yup, it's his problem. So? I dont think anybody would sleep less because of it.

That's the same like on social groups: if you have a group A and an outsider B who wants to be part of group A, what does he have to do? Right, he has to adapt to the rules the group A has chosen. If he doesn't want to adapt, he remains an outsider. Same for countries: if you want to live here in Germany, you have to adapt to local rules. If not, you're an outsider. The same counts for every other country in the world.

Your example is very good to remind you that when the European Union was formed, the inhabitants of the countries were not required to use only one idiom. They just respected the original idiom.

But they're now changing that. More and more european laws are being introduced. Of course this was not done "right away" ... also because of legal reasons. However, that discussion doesn't belong here.

This is more like what I proposed. Respect the style of the original contributor if he would like that. Otherwise move to PEAR style if the original contributor would not mind. This is community spirit. You will have an hard time coercing contributors that are not willing to change their style. The loss is for the community and the contributors that are not willing to change. You seem to lack of the necessary tolerance to see that.

PEAR has no legal issues at all regarding to this. If a user wants to contribute, he needs to adopt. This is the same for the PHP C Source, the Linux kernel source and numerous other projects. It's a sane thing to have the same style throughout your project. period.

Bjorn you do not need to sell PHP to me or anybody here. The point is that PHP lacks of serious tools for developing enteprise applications that are granted to other languages.

Like what?

Persecution mania, part IV?

Yep, ask the Sterling Hughes, Derick Rethans, Sebastian Bergmann, James Cox, etc... (all @php.net badgers) they are the ones that I recall better of expressing sick envy and get very disturbed when I try to help somebody in PHP mailing lists and newsgroups pointing them to classes in the PHP Classes site that may solve the users problems. Do you really want to keep bringing the issue further? It is not helping anybody here.

Don't think for a second I envy you.

PEAR is open for everything, but it wants to assure that the quality of the code will remain on one level. That's the main big difference.

Only on your mind quality is measured by style.

The PEAR CS also tell about structure, not only style. Derick