Re: Some PEAR remarks

Hello, Stig S. Bakken wrote:

I always said, I do not want to go where I am not wanted. But if I am not wanted, I would like those that do not want me to have the decency of admiting it publically so he stop making each other spend time on things that will never happen.

Okay, let me make this clear: the kind of behaviour you are showing here is completely off-base. You may be a brilliant coder and even a nice guy for all I know, but all I have seen from you on this list is relentless self-promotion and accusations that are on the verge of paranoia. If this is what you intend to keep doing, I sure don't want you here.

I'm sorry but I am just expressing exactly what I think. Despite all the discussions, I thought it was accepted the work to merge Metabase in PEAR-DB. Lukas has been working very hard to make it happed despite all difficulties of acceptance that you keep making.

Accusations, accusations, accusations. As much as I'd like to, I simply don't have time to contribute, at least not now.

The issue is not having time but rather the excuses that Tomas is presenting to Lukas privately to state that MDB is not acceptable. If you are not aware, at least try to inform yourself to understand the problem.

Just the other day, I asked him how it was coming and he told me about his frustration that despite his dedication, Tomas is still rowing against his efforts.

Please present evidence that Tomas is trying to stop Lukas, or stop accusing him.

From what Lukas told me in a private message, Tomas is still telling to Lukas that MDB is not good enough because of performance claims.

He told me that even after Lukas reformatted the code to conform to your unflexible rules, Tomas is still raising objections regarding Metabase performance claims and that Tomas is not willing to help in practice. I would understand if Tomas just did not cooperate because he would not have time, but Lukas told me that instead of helping him to overcome the so claimed performance issues, Tomas is spending time optimizing the current PEAR-DB implementation. A person that does not the time to help overcome the so claimed Metabase performance issues, certainly does not have the time to overcome the current PEAR-DB implementation performance issues.

Did you ever consider that Tomas may be using the current DB implementation in his work?

But of course we all know that Tomas only want to use his current implementation now and *EVER*! Aren't you following what is going on or are you just playing along with Tomas in the this game of let's stall the merger forever?

Look, we are not stupid that we don't understand that Tomas is just working hard on perpertuating the current PEAR-DB implementation because it is his beloved code. Improving the current PEAR-DB performance is just a way boycott the merger by claiming that Metabase would not outperform his current PEAR-DB implementation.

That is your assumption. What you are doing is blame Tomas for supporting code he is maintaining.

I do not believe you are that naive as you seem to show yourself! Tomas never wanted to support anything else than his code! Do you still have doubts?

If he would really be truthfully willing to help Metabase-PEAR-DB merger to happen, he would not be rowing in the opposite direction. I don't know what you think of us, but we are not kids to be bothered to enter in "Tomas boycotts Metabase" games. PEAR and the PHP community in general could benefit of a better standard database abstraction package right away by benefiting of all Metabase advantages that I will not bother to repeat once again. However, the community is just not benefitting from it because Tomas ego and his obcession to perpetuate his PEAR-DB code, is more important than the benefit of the whole community. I will tell you once more, if Tomas is set to succeed in the Metabase merger boycott, I would like him to be a man and step forward and admit it, so we stop spending time on something will not happen and the community be clarified that the Metabase-PEAR-DB merger will not happen because in fact you do not want it to happen.

Tomas is not stopping anyone. AFAIR, he stated from the very beginning that he would not put much energy into the merger, which is just the kind of statement you are referring to.

That is what he said publically, but when Lukas asked for feedback on his efforts nobody answered and in private messages Tomas is still raising objections despite Lukas already PEARified MDB! Don't you see that Tomas does not have the courage to oppose to the merger publically because he would be condemned by everybody, but it is still boycotting as much as he can off this list?

I find it striking that critisim of PEAR comes so easy to you when you are running a "competing" project with banner ads that you have expressed the intent of being able to sustain yourself economically on?

You are wild-guessing. Let me clarify that you're guess is wrong. I do not have a competing project. If you assume that my PHP Classes site is a competing project, that would certainly explain why you have been making it so hard since PEAR was started, to not say impossible, to accept anything that is related with my work. I am trying to make the PHP Classes a source of income so I can justify the full time work that I dedicate to it. That is natural thing because like most people that have a family to sustain and if I can't make my work on the site sustain my family, I have to seek some other job and will have to stop the site. This is none of your business but since you implied false claims of my posture relating it with my site goals, I can tell you what I have in mind is providing more services than the site provides now for free. I still even don't know if what I have in mind will become viable. Unfortunately banner ads do not do to make the site survive, especially because the PHP community is a very small niche market for advertisers to invest on. I would love to be proved wrong. Since you are somehow in the Internet business, I thought you should know that better.

Note the quotes around "competing" please. PHP Classes and PEAR overlap only slightly in purpose, although I'm pretty sure PEAR's success will not contribute to your income flow.

You are pretty wrong! I was not supposed to talk about this before I can confirm that the plan is viable, but since you are questioning my good intentions, be aware that my intention is that if PEAR becomes the standard library of components as PHP needs, is to ship PEAR distribution within a PHP Classes CD that is meant to be released every three months. This means more value for the CD subscribers and more awareness for the whole PEAR project. It is too bad that you see the PHP Classes as a threat to PEAR as you always did since the beginning 2 years ago when you even attempted to discourage me to release Metabase that had already over 1 year of development and was going to released publically for the first time. Then you also refused to cooperate in the development of single PHP components repository because you thought you would always do better without my help. It is funny that now you claim that just want to compete when it was you that forked your own projects to compete with mine, both Metabase and the PHP Classes site, instead of cooperating!

But the fact is that you have an economical interest in PHP Classes, if ever so well-meaning. PEAR is a 100% non-paid volunteer project. This

The PHP Classes site was always a done on my free time. The problem is that it has grown to a point that it consumes all my time to support and develop. Since my son was born, I stopped working on an management job that I had and stayed at home to enjoy while he is just small baby. You have kids, so you know that staying close this time of their lives is priceless, but I don't live in Norway, so the license for fathers to stay with their newborns is just 1 week. I have been away from the work market at my expense, but I can't remain this way forever. So, my options get back to a proper job and have little or no free time to maintain the site properly, or try to make it generate some income from it and continue to develop the site. So, what is your problem with this? Maybe you would be satisfied that I just closed the site and get back to a well paid suit's job!?

contrast should tell you to be very careful about your never-ending self-promotion. It would be easy to accuse you of trying to drive traffic to your site this way, which IMHO would be unethical. Do you see anyone here "advertising" on the metabase list?

You are mixing the balls here. If you remember correctly, it was I that proposed the merger so we only have one standard database abstraction package that provides the best of all worlds for the benefit of the whole PHP community that cares about database abstractions and stop some people complaints that all other languages have one and only one database abstraction package and PHP does not have one, which are just misinformed complaints that still persist! If I talk about the advantages of Metabase is because I feel it would great that all PHP users that want it, can benefit from it. But, as I always say, I don't want to go where I am not wanted. If you do not want to benefit from Metabase capabilities because of some silly accusation of self promotion, hey, be a man and tell me in the face and I'll just drop it.

Anyway, my posture regarding PEAR is consistent has ever. You work with rules that favor elitist (only a few can contribute) as opposed to making it more open to the whole community. Like others have expressed as well, I think you are missing chances to make PEAR and PHP more popular to assure that it will survive over the years.

PEAR is in beta. And because the community is still small (because PEAR is still in beta), the community can be considered "in beta" too. Do you really think it would be a good idea to start a project like this by announcing "free CVS accounts! come fill up up our hard drive!"? Anyone can contribute to PEAR. The guidelines are there to prevent the system from falling into chaos.

In practice things are just not that simple. Sometimes I even bother to comment, like in this last case of Markus lame excuse for not evaluating the contribution of Wojciech Zielinski, but usually I just watch from a distance and shake my head everytime I see yet another rejection. I don't think you understand how heartless and insensitive you are being you just reject submissions either because you present lame excuses for not accepting or even evaluation or just ignoring peoples message. That makes you look stupidly arrogant when you should be thankful when somebody tries to contribute to your project. I wonder if you ever think how are you been seen by the community. It doesn't seem you do. If you really care about PHP, care about the community contributors. Can't you see you are hurting people? Have a heart!

This is just one aspect that you PHP developers are missing. I will not repeat previous arguments, but I am afraid that in a few years the PHP will be as small as for instance the TCL community, once a great language, now in the shadow as yet another toy language only used by a few fanatics. Having a single standard database abstraction layer for developing portable database applications, not only is a need but is also urgent. As we all know, the current PEAR-DB implementation is not there . Metabase was the change to make it catch up before it is too late because the lack of portability is yet another argument for the lack of appeal of PHP that makes many people avoid it and many current users drop it. I am concerned with that as ever. Too bad that for the sake of Tomas ego you are not letting PHP/PEAR catch on.

So what is stopping you from helping Lukas with the merger? Do you really feel you are in a position where you can reasonably blame Tomas for not contributing when you are not helping out yourself?

As I said, Lukas did all that he could to satisfy your demands of conformance, including going through the pain of PEARifing hundreds of line of code that basically add no functionality and even risk to add bugs to previously bug free code. Once he did it, Tomas is still raising objections to Lukas, this time regarding performance claims. I am helping Lukas by having the guts to come here ask for a satisfaction regarding this farse of Tomas keeping to boycott the merger behind the scenes. I just do not know where you stand. Either you playing along with Tomas and let him boycott forever or your just being naive and closing your eyes. In the first case, we just want to know so we can drop this impossible mission for good. In the last case, I suggest that you take a stand and stop the Tomas farse. Regards, Manuel Lemos