Re: Questions about PEAR & Composer

Hi Sequoia,

On 16.07.2013 4:41, Sequoia McDowell wrote:
> Hi Composer, Packagist & PEAR people,
>
> I'm giving a talk next month about dependency management in PHP.
> http://www.northeastphp.org/talks/view/21/Package-Management-in-PHP-Better-Late-than-Never
>
> I want to make sure my talk is accurate & covers the right things.  To that
> end, I have some questions for you.  Please feel free to answer what you
> wish and ignore those that don't apply or are not related to your project
> (or answer all, I welcome all input :).
>
> PEAR Questions
> ==============
> My talk is not about PEAR per se but I want to touch on it as it's an
> obvious precursor to Composer.
> 1. Why did PEAR not catch on more widely?  Were technical limitations like
> lack of namespaces a major factor or was it primarily cultural? (For what
> it's worth I've used PEAR myself; Auth & MDB2 packages among others).

PEAR-the-library did catch on pretty widely until Zend Framework happened. You 
can easily compare the amount of traffic on PEAR lists before and after ZF.

ZF was heavily advertised (with a generous dose of FUD) and backed by Zend's 
money, unlike PEAR which was always a volunteer project. People who were seeking 
an "official PHP library" moved on to ZF.

The decision to distribute ZF as a big lump of code instead of using the 
existing means of managing dependencies didn't help PEAR-the-installer, either.

> 2. What were some of PEAR's most notable successes?

Channels, allowing people to distribute their code using PEAR-the-installer 
without jumping through hoops of proposing a package to PEAR-the-library.

> 3. What's a good example of a popular project that relies heavily on PEAR
> today (or in the past)?

Lots of well-known PHP projects host their own PEAR channels to distribute code: 
https://pear.php.net/channels/

> 4. How is PEAR different than Composer/Packagist?

PEAR is mostly targeted at installing system-wide collection of packages. 
Composer is targeted at managing dependencies for a particular project.

Of course, there is Pyrus, which can manage both, but it is in alpha for years.

> 5. What does the future hold for PEAR & what is its role if Composer
> continues on its trajectory towards being the de facto dependency
> management tool in PHP (and package repo with Packagist)?

The future for PEAR-the-installer looks pretty bleak, of course, unless we push 
out a stable Pyrus.

PEAR-the-library is largely irrelevant with channels.




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