Re: Overlay approach

> I think that both approaches have merit. I like to have a consistent > development library to work with, on the other hand I think PEAR will scale > about 10 to 100x faster if it is made more accessible to the general PHP > development community. Personally, I think we can have both. As the bionic > man used to say, "we have the technology". And this will happen. We are still trying to nail down some coding standards and the PHPDoc tool has come along. It has always been planned to split PEAR CVS away from PHP CVS when PEAR had enough momentum to stand on its own. And a dedicated PEAR site is also in the plans. > I think an overlay-based browse and distribution model could address most of > the conflicting viewpoints cited above. Perhaps. But someone would have to sit down and do the work. And we need to get the core stuff done before we can start thinking about extending things like you suggest. Personally I don't really see the need for PEAR to grow to swallow up all other code repositories. If there are repositories that fill this need then people will use them and they will stand on their own merit. I see no reason why authors of popular classes that have been contributed to other class repositories wouldn't eventually submit them to PEAR. Just like I don't see why Manuel wouldn't submit his Metabase system to PEAR. Mature, stable and documented classes is what PEAR aims to provide for people. Another aspect of PEAR that hasn't really been discussed is that it will eventually get hooks into the main php build system such that PEAR components can actually be true PHP extensions written in C. -Rasmus