[dev] Constructive Criticism/Venting

[Remi Collet]

Le 12/03/2014 08:07, Michael M Slusarz a écrit :
>
> My take on the situation is that, for all intents and purposes, PEAR is
> dead.  

I agree PEAR as a library is dead, it kills itself.

But PEAR as an installer is still alive as an installer, even is some
projects move to "tarball" distribution (and composer) such as sabredav,
symfony (pear channel exists but is broken) phpunit (pear channel is now
only used to distribute the phar version), ...

PEAR is the only one to support system-wide installation.

AFAIK, PEAR is still used by downstream distribution (ex: Fedora and
EPEL, Debian, ...), so download stat for pear package is probably not
revelant in most case.

Yes, switching to "tarball" packaging in downstream will be a huge work
(well... horde is still not fully approved in fedora... after >1 year)
and I have start working on this switch for phpunit stack.

But to be pragmatic, what IMHO we really expect from upstream, more than
the installation method is
- clean component life cycle (versioning, ...)
- clean dependency description (php, extension, other component)
- downstream/upstream communication

So while my heart cry "keep PEAR channel", I perfectly know this is
something which is going to die, sooner or later.


Regards,
Remi.