[PEAR-DEV] Re: [dev] Re: Horde Browser.lib and Crypt_PGP

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Quoting "Damian Fernandez Sosa (DESC)" <damlists at cnba.uba.ar>:

> If you make those packages generic and submit to PEAR your work will be
> used by even more people than if you make it horde specific.
>
> If your work is seen/used by more people, you have more chances to
> receive more patches and features than making it horde specific.
> Don you think.

Well, maybe. Maybe not. Horde has a very large *user* base. The programmer
base is not as large as PEAR's, but the sysadmin-level base is, probably,
larger. Until very recently, forcing those users to install PEAR packages
*significantly* increased the difficulty of successfully installing Horde.

We still contributed the Mail code, the Log code, and more, and used those,
and it led to countless problems with people who couldn't get them
installed correctly.

Even now, adding lots of PEAR dependancies isn't exactly a great way to make
installing an application easier. PEAR is great for people writing their
own sites, but only just getting to a level of useability needed to make it
manageable with widely-distributed applications.

So what I have been wanting to do, and have started doing, is to provide
PEAR-style packages of Horde code and make them available from
http://pear.horde.org/. No one has much cared, so the site is still very
simple and the code isn't the latest that's in CVS. But you can install
those packages using PEAR tools, and I'd like to make more of Horde
available there. That way we can keep generating easy-to-use packages for
people looking to just install Horde, but also provide reuseable components
to the general PHP programmer community.

The PEAR community, however, seems to want control of the code instead.
Hopefully I'm wrong about this or it will change, but that is the
impression I keep getting every time I mention this.

> I was thinking that this code could be useful to everybody and also to
> HORDE (if the class is accepted I will make a patch to HORDE's pgp.php to
> allow to use the PEAR class instead of the actual code)

Again, what is the problem with just making the code out of Horde CVS
packageable? No one has bothered to answer this question!

-chuck

--
Charles Hagenbuch, <chuck at horde.org>
"... It is not more light we need, but more warmth! We die of cold, not of
darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost." - Miguel de
Unamuno