Re: Re: downloads...genuine?

Hello, on 08/26/2005 09:20 AM Wez Furlong said the following:

Wez, I understand that you rightfully take yourself pretty much as the father of PECL, so for me it is natural that you are very sensitive to the subject of awareness of PECL and its projects.

Not especially sensitive, but your comments were basically saying that PECL sucks and that someone should spend money to advertise it. Both points are not really true.

No, you are taking wrong conclusions from something I never said. I never said PECL sucks. I said it needs to provide better visibility to its packages and PECL itself, or else very few people will use them. I suggested that it needs to be advertised, not necessarily paying. What I told you, and you were not aware, is that Zend is spending money advertising PECL resources because they seem they can and they want to. Other companies with an advertising budget may also follow. I also believe that a lot can be done to promote sites with PHP resources without paying for advertising. For instance, the PHP Classes started last year the PHP Programming Innovation Award. http://www.phpclasses.org/award/innovation/ Every month the most innovating classes released in the site are nominated. In the following month, there is a poll to let uses vote on the most innovating classes. http://www.phpclasses.org/vote.html In the next month the winners are announced and they may pick a prize provided by one of many sponsors. Other nominees that follow after the winners may also gain prizes as long as there are enough sponsors to provide the prizes. This goes on every month. http://www.phpclasses.org/winners.html The result of this has been spectacular. Everybody wins. The innovating authors may earn prizes, the users may have access to more and more high quality classes, and the sponsors get plenty of exposure and a small cost which is the prize they contribute. This is just an example of an initiative that did not cost money to the PHP Classes site, other than the value effort of coding the necessary resources and additional bandwidth that it takes to nominate, vote and announce the awards. I am not telling you to copy the idea, although you can adopt a similar idea if you think it makes sense to you. Another idea, the PHP Classes site also establishes partnerships with many other sites of content of interest to the PHP community, 16 sites in total currently. The partnership involves providing mutual visibility. No money is involved. In the past I have already proposed the same kind of partnership to PEAR people. They did seem to be interested, probably because they see the PHP Classes site as competitor. I do not see PEAR as a competitor despite the similarities. They were not interested to cooperate, but that is fine for me too. If you are interested to cooperate to provide mutual visibility to PECL and the PHP Classes site, I am open for discussion of the details. If you are not interested, that is fine for me too.

OTOH, I honestly wish that the PHP community really started cooperating effectively, instead of jumping on this "lets nuke each other attitude". A lot of opportunities will be wasted otherwise.

Right, so the day that you actually submit a patch to peclweb (or any part of the PHP project) with that in mind will herald a new era of cooperation for PHP.

erm... either you are confusing me with somebody else or your memory is betraying you! AFAIK I have started submitting patches to PHP in 1998, way before I ever heard about you participating in the PHP community. Here is one submission of a patch to implement HTTP PUT method support: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=782 Now what is amazing is that you do not recall that I have submitted this patch to fix a bug in your streams implementation of TCP socket connections, that YOU ended up improving and committing it. http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=25939 This is just to mention two of the patches that I submitted. I also submitted many bug reports and in some hinted about directions for fixes like these and others before PHP 4 that I am not able to search in the bug database for some odd reason. http://bugs.php.net/search.php?cmd=display&author_email=mlemos%40acm.org I could also mention a number of important features and tools that I have proposed over time but were implemented by somebody else after my proposals. However I am not going to drag this issue more than this because you should get the point by now. Maybe you are under too much stress and that is not allowing you to realize that you are attacking the wrong person, as I only came here to help, first by pinpointing the problems, and second proposing solutions. It is sad that you do not reckon value on this effort of mine with the "contribute patches" excuse.

Sure, my point is that Matthew seems to have created high expectations on those unreliable statistics, when I believe that in fact nobody is giving him any feedback about his package.

No, Matthew is simply asking if those high numbers are accurate, because he had had no feedback. He didn't create any expectations; you read it completely wrong.

How about if you let him speak for himself? Matthew as just spoken and does not seem like he did not appreciate the feedback.

I know that Zend is paying to advertise PECL

Maybe if you worked closely to Zend marketing department you would probably know. I have seen PECL ads in Google Adwords ads in several popular PHP sites.

I read all my pecl related mail via gmail, and have never ever seen anything advertising PECL in the adwords to the right (unless the PECL project now includes various types of chips and circuit boards).

As I told, you may or may not see that ad that I mentioned. It may appear or not when you access that page because Google content matching technique makes the different ads rotate, that may match according to the perception of context of their engine. So, if you keep reloading this page you may end up seeing it soon or later. Actually I have seen them today again but does not appear every time in this page. http://www.phpclasses.org/reviews/id/1411601882.html

If such ads do exist, they are not "official".

I don't know what you call "official" but the ads point to http://www.zend.com/pecl . It would be very odd if this was not Zend paying to advertise that. Actually I tell you more. Not only there are PECL ads but also PEAR ads pointing to http://www.zend.com/pear . Actually I have spotted one mistake in one PECL ad pointing to a PEAR page http://www.zend.com/pear . Anyway, why are you concerned to deny these ads that many people have seen? Does it bother you? Are you against Zend advertising PECL? Now I am intrigued!

Nobody is insulting anybody here.

I disagree; If I were Matthew and I didn't know you, surely I'd feel really insulted by your comments so far.

I am glad Matthew is not you because he seems to be more open minded and did not take anything as a personal insult, as he already mentioned.

It does not matter whether there is time and people willing to work on the problems, if there is nobody that first brings up the problems and propose solutions. This is what I think I am doing as positive to help. I hope you no longer have any difficulty to realize that.

I (and many others) only have difficulty with your attitude; we certainly do appreciate constructive criticisms, but we appreciate patches to correct problems even more than a continual stream of negativity.

If you stop and look at yourself right now, you may notice that you are the one that is being negative. I pointed problems and presented solutions, but you seem to act as a censor that does not want to hear about criticisms . This way it does not seem like you really want my help.

The pecl web site is in CVS; show some good will for a change and send us a patch that fixes the problems you've identified. (note that I don't disagree with your points, just in the way that you're putting them across).

Look, I have nothing to contribute to PECL because right now I am not using anything from it. Maybe if I had a project in PECL the things would be different. If you noticed, the patches that I submitted in the past were to fix things about PHP that I was using. It does not make much sense for me to spend time fixing things that I do not need, even more because I have more important PHP projects unrelated to PECL to carry one. If you doubt it, here is a Freshmeat page with all my public projects so you can realize how busy I am: http://freshmeat.net/~mlemos/ Anyway, that should not stop me or anybody else to point problems and present solutions, because in the end we will all benefit from it. Personally I regret the fact that after 10 years of history the PHP community as a whole does not cooperate more, sometimes for silly ego matters, other times because projects that could cooperate take other projects as competitors. This way it is hard to motivate people contributing to PHP more and the opportunities are wasted. Anyway, at least I tried to contribute the way I can right now. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos PHP Classes - Free ready to use OOP components written in PHP http://www.phpclasses.org/ PHP Reviews - Reviews of PHP books and other products http://www.phpclasses.org/reviews/ Metastorage - Data object relational mapping layer generator http://www.meta-language.net/metastorage.html