Re: course paper about PEAR - help

Karlis Vesters wrote:

I have written you - I am a studen from Latvian University who is writing a course paper about PEAR.

If its in english it would be great if you can make your findings available to us.

And now I have a few more questions: 1) have you any ither presentations ( graphs or other types) about different dependence of PEAR classes (global (between big classes) and local (for each big PEAR class).

I am not aware of any such graphs. Might be very interesting. We do however list the package dependencies as well as what packages depend on a given package on the package homepage.

2) is PEAR project growing (number of people who works on the project) and why there is so less documentation even on a most used classes

This is probably due to the fact that PEAR has mostly been used by other PEAR developers. This is changing more and more however since PEAR was officially launched. Documentation is a task often done by users rather than developers in opensource. There is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here, which we are trying to overcome by lowering the barrier to entry into writing documentation.

3) why is it better to use installation instead of simple uncompressing package to the needed directory

The advantage of using the installer is mainly in dependency checking. The installer will ensure that you install all the relevant dependency. Warn the user if optional dependecies are missing etc. The installer can also be setup to enforce (which can be manually overwritten) accidental installation of package that dont match a certain state (usually stable). This can be important to ensure that a alpha/beta packages are installed onto a production machine. Another advantage is with handling C extension installation which can get a bit more tedious. Finally with the imminent addition of the channel support in the installer people can configure their installer to check for a given package in several different repositories in a specific order. This means you could for example have your own repository of modified PEAR packages which you check first and only if the package you are looking for is not in that repository will the installer look into the official PEAR repository. regards, Lukas Smith smith@backendmedia.com _______________________________ BackendMedia www.backendmedia.com berlin@backendmedia.com Linn Zwoch Smith GbR Pariser Str. 44 D-10707 Berlin Tel +49 30 83 22 50 00 Fax +49 30 83 22 50 07