Re: Questions about PEAR & Composer

On 16.07.2013 02:41, 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
> ==============

I'll skip the PEAR stuff since it was already covered quite well by the
others that know more about it than I do anyway.

> Composer/Packagist Questions
> ============================
> 1. What was the impetus behind developing Composer?

We needed a package manager solution for Symfony2 bundles, and that both
given Symfony2 itself and some of the bundles depended on generic
libraries it made a lot of sense to build a generic solution. In any
case given the situation back then with most people not using PEAR (for
various good and bad reasons I assume) it made sense to build something
for PHP as a whole and not just yet another framework-specific
half-assed plugin manager.

> 2. Is Laravel the best example of a project that embraces
> modular/package based development or is there another you'd recommend
> looking at?

I don't know if it's the best, and I don't know Laravel so much, but I
think it's a good example of something that is built on top of many
existing things. Symfony2 itself is still somewhat monolithic in form,
even though it's built on top of and made of standalone components.
Silex is another good example I would say.

> 3. What [types of] libraries would you like to see on Packagist that
> aren't there currently?

At this point I think there is more stuff that I'd rather not see there
than that I think is missing ;) Just kidding but there is a lot and
beyond a few PEAR/PEAR2 libs that were built for very specific use cases
you can find most things on Packagist now. And some of those PEAR libs
can be found there as well, they usually just need someone with the
motivation to send a pull request and make it happen.

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

(Obviously I'm biased, so take this with a grain of salt:) The main two
differentiator to me are ease of use and the project-centric dependency
management vs global-centric installs. The ease of use argument
obviously varies from person to person, but I have been struggling quite
a bit to keep Composer as easy to use and set up as possible, and to
make sure that weird platform specific issues are worked around smoothly
where we can, or that people get decent errors when we can't. Some
people still manage to find themselves in a pickle obviously so this is
a never-ending process.

> 5. What's on the roadmap for Composer?

Aside from some memory usage improvements and overall bug fixing to make
it work everywhere, I think it's getting there. There are a few nice to
have things on the issue tracker but I think the core features are
covered reasonably well by now.

Cheers

-- 
Jordi Boggiano
@seldaek - http://nelm.io/jordi

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