Re: What is the necessity to use a installer to install php pear

On 5/7/06, moses@softwaysolutions.com <moses@softwaysolutions.com> wrote:

Hi everybody I am new to pear... and i have some doubts regarding installing pear

Doubts? I think you mean questions.

1)To install pear every document says run the installer. 2)What is this installer

It is the PEAR installer. This is part of what PEAR is, a distribution system for packages. It allows you to easily install, uninstall, and upgrade packages.

3)Since pear is a package of classes where we can make use of it Why cant we just copy the class file and create an instance and make use of the methods.

Because PEAR is more than this. Yes, a package is a tarball of PHP files, but they are laid out in a specific manner in your PEAR install directory. The installer takes care of this. In addition, many packages use the same directories as other packages and it is easier to let the installer put everything in the right place than to do it manually every time. In addition, the installer make upgrading a package easy. Say a package you're using has a bug which has been fixed or a new feature in a new release. Upgrading is as simple as "pear upgrade Package" and it takes care of removing old files, adding new files, etc.

4)What is necessity here to install.

PEAR wants you to be able to easily install and upgrade your packages. The installer makes this so.

5)What is this installer doing

Installing packages, of course. It also has support for replacements in files (for, say, package versions) which some packages use and for pre and post install scripts which a few packages use. It also allows you to choose what stability you want it to use. So if you set it to "stable" you will install and upgrade only with stable versions. Oh, and the most important feature, it deals with dependencies, both required and optional and also has support for dependency groups for the more complicated packages, such as the installer itself (it has web installer and GTK installer groups). Lastly, the installer also has "channel" support which means that you can install packages in the same easy way from other package sites, such as pearified.com. -- Justin Patrin