Re: Questions about PEAR & Composer

 Thank you everyone for your input & help!  My talk is tomorrow morning,
hopefully everyone will find it informative & it will be accurate.  If
you'd like to see my slides, they can be found here:
http://sequoia.github.io/composer-talk/

The source is here if you want to read in as plain text and see my notes:
https://github.com/Sequoia/composer-talk/blob/gh-pages/index.html

Let me know if you have any further input or feedback.  Thanks again,
Sequoia


On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 11:57 AM, Jordi Boggiano <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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
>