RE: [PEAR] Learning PEAR

> From: Keith Edmunds [mailto:keith@midnighthax.com] > Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 10:30 PM > PEAR has so much potential. > > The documentation for PEAR is _SO_ hard to work with <snip> > 1. Real programmers don't need documentation: they work it all out by > reading source. > 2. PEAR is well documented, Keith: you've just reached the age where > you're too slow to pick it up. > 3. There is possibly a documentation issue, but the people who use PEAR > know how to use it so that's just fine. Well there are a couple things going on here. PEAR has actually been around for a lot of time, but there was not as much enforcing of the internal regulations or all that many regulations in terms of documentation for example. Also PEAR historically was about a few people working on infrastructure and other than that mostly developers that independently develop their packages. Most QA was done by reading other people commits, but there was no methodology or responsibilities assigned. For docs there was a manual and a very small number of people that cared. To make matters worse its not that trivial a format to write in and building the documentation is not easy and tools to make it easy are sparse at best. So this is why things are as they are. So what about the future. Here we will do a few things. Foremost we are building teams that will focus on ensuring that all the nice infrastructure is used to its fullest potential and also improve the infrastructure for their given area. For docs there are a lot of efforts underway that should improve the situation. Never the less we need people like you who are willing to help! This does require a bit of digging in ATM, as our teams are not yet settled in (we need a doc team homepage, a qa team homepage explaing how to help etc). So all I can say is don't give up on PEAR. Your criticism is being taken serious and I assure you that we are already working at improving the situation. And most importantly I hope that you find a way to become an active member of the community once you find the place where you feel the most useful and have some time to spare on. Regards, Lukas