package validation (was Re: [PEAR-QA] Re: PHP_Beautifier-0.0.6.1 (devel) Released.)

Stefan Neufeind wrote:

On 4 Jun 2004 at 14:32, Tomas V.V.Cox wrote:

Stefan Neufeind wrote: I didn't know that was even supported by the installer, maybe the solution is just to restrict version numbers to three digits in package.xml validation.

Yes, to strictly restrict - no more and not less then three (afaik we had a two-digit-number recently as well). Volunteers that have maybe already worked on the package.xml-validation? Sounds like a quickfix to me ...

Well, is not trivial at all, remember that pear is not PEAR only. The goal of pear (the pear cmd) is to be an universal installer for software written in php, so we can't enforce our rules. Even with channels comming fast this point will become worse. The pear installer needs urgently, apart of a decent DTD validation, one of these two: a) Remove any PEAR coding standar rule that is hardcoded today. b) Provide something like a plug-in system which validates the package.xml fields according to the rules of each "channel" developers. This b) plug-in system could be done for example inside a "prepackage" script (following the email about pre/post install scripts). Inside this script, PEAR could enforce all the rules they want, for example this one on version numbers with 3 digits. Other channels may code their own rules, for example the Linux kernel one (odd numbers requires state devel, pair stable) or releases < 0.x should be always <= beta. We could go more far and btw perform some basic QA tasks before any developer can package his release (check no parse errors or ensure all test passes). That could be done for all pear packages or just any lead could code the checks he want depending on the QA level to accomplish. This would be very helpful for lazy developers or if you don't trust too much on the developers of your package (including one). Tomas V.V.Cox