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

[Damian Fernandez Sosa (DESC)]

Quoting Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org>:

> 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,

I proudly belong to that user base. 

> larger. Until very recently, forcing those users to install PEAR packages
> *significantly* increased the difficulty of successfully installing Horde.

Shoudn't be fixed this by making a dependency check (and  installer) php script?
if that script finds that this installation has an older version or PEAR
packages (based on a xml config file) auto-install them?






> 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.
> 
PEAR exits the beta cycle not a long time ago. And the windows installer is not
working yet (I try to install pear in windows  using the pear command with no
luck) so problems still happen  :(


> 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.


And what happen if that package is written as PEAR wants? HORDE can have the
packages in a horde Specific directory (the horde lib dir) and also somebody -
the package author or other people - can upload then in pear.

and everybody happy. PEAR will have a lot of new very useful classes that
anybody can use and horde will not brake dependencies

(the only diference between a horde lib and a pear package sould be the
include(´PEAR/Package') line if the package has dependencies.




> 
> 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 think that the code is controlled by its developers.



> > 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!

Here is an example that happened to me:


I needed to mass-create the pgp keys to 3500 users those users lives in a mysql
DB, the priv key is in the same db but the public in an LDAP. (I need this to
allow all my 3500 users to have pgp functionality without asking them to create
the keys  )

Using the Pear packages  and the re-factored PGP class the work was making a 30
lines script instead of a more large program.


the same script now is used in my site to allow the new created users to
automatically have pgp activated before they log-on for the first time.


As you can see making that work class compatible has its benefits.

(also your class has a larger userbase that is capable of submit more bugs/patches)






I think that there is a lot of HORDE classes that can have that double
personality (been part of HORDE but also been a PEAR package)












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