Re: Distribution of PEAR w/ progs.

In response to what Markus said with the windows dll's. I suppose with our ridiculously powerful machines and huge hard drive most of that doesn't matter, the difference between 16kb on a 120 GB harddrive and not having that 16kb dll doesn't matter. In our environment, where most of it is the web where space is restricted, and we are more limited, it does matter. - Stan Markus Wolff wrote:

Stan Lemon wrote:

I guess what boggles me is, isn't PEAR supposed to be a common Library that PHP developers can use? Common libraries aren't supposed to be distributed.

That depends on your POV. Until recently, it was quite common for Windows applications to install needed DLL´s in one central place. Unfortunately, you very quickly ended up having several apps using the same DLL´s, but requiring different versions. That´s when the term "DLL hell" was invented ;-) With .NET, Microsoft has changed this paradigm - most .NET apps now bring all the needed DLLs bundled in one of the app´s subdirectories. This results in apps that can be easily deployed via "copy & paste" rather than having to rely on an installer that will take care of any dependencies etc. Personally, I think centralized libraries were a very good idea back in the time when RAM and CPU cycles were rare and expensive. Nowadays they´re seldomly more than a compatibility issue, especially in quickly changing environments - which is where we come back on topic, because this is the world of the web :-) CU Markus