[dev] Constructive Criticism/Venting

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Mathieu Parent <math.parent at gmail.com>:

> Hi all,
>
> 2014-03-12 8:07 GMT+01:00 Michael M Slusarz <slusarz at horde.org>:
>> Quoting Ralf Lang <lang at b1-systems.de>:
>>
>>> On the pirum thing: This is going to be interesting for packagers. Does
>>> this mean that pear (in any form) is obsolete? This would mean
>>> distributions have to re-tool and rebase their rpm/debs on composer files.
>>
>>
>> My take on the situation is that, for all intents and purposes, PEAR is
>> dead.  At least going forward.  It exists to install legacy/existing
>> software.  But no new projects/code is going to use it.  (I've had some
>> patches accepted into PEAR months ago but there appears to be little/no
>> motiviation to release a new version.)
>
> Please don't remove PEAR packages and channel. We use them to make the
> debian packages.
>
>> Although, that being said, composer lacks a mean to install libraries
>> globally (at least I'm not aware of one).  Which tools like npm and ruby
>> gems allow.  So it's not a drop-in replacement for PEAR either.
>
> What is missing in composer:
> - clean way to install system-wide
> - related: a clean policy to avoid name clashes
> - minor: long description in composer.json (it only has short desc)
> - PECL support (i.e. you will still need PEAR for horde_lz4)
>
> We also need to adapt our tools, which may take some time.

For the record ... I never said that we should abandon PEAR.  I don't  
see any reason to.  We already have an established release and  
installation process using PEAR and there's no reason to switch away  
from this just to cater to the new flavor of the month.

I am instead saying that we need to adapt our release process and/or  
repository architecture to better handle integration with composer as  
an alternative to PEAR.

Packagist is becoming the new pear.php.net - and would be a fantastic  
platform for us to distribute the modular libraries we have that are  
way better than anything else out there.  But packagist has very  
strict requirements as to repo architecture, as opposed to creating  
PEAR packages, so we unfortunately need to find a way to accomodate  
the former since the latter can be worked around from our end.

michael

___________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at horde.org]