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Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2019 18:11:10 +0100
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To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Changing PECL signup flow.
From: Danack@basereality.com (Dan Ackroyd)

HI internals,

Currently, it is quite difficult to signup to get a PECL account.

We have a somewhat deliberately obtuse form to signup through, which
then needs to be manually approved by someone with the appropriate
karma.

Over the past year two people who I know from the community have
reached out to me to ask "we've submitted our account application, how
do we get approved now", after their application has sat un-actioned
for weeks. And only after I spoke to someone with the appropriate
karma was their account approved.

I would like to suggest the following changes both to allow it easier
to publish PECL extensions, and also prevent that causing problems.

# Allow a new signup method

Allow people who want a PECL account to submit a link to github repo
(or alternative VCS provider) that contains a 'ready-to-ship' PHP
extension repo.

We (or probably, I) will provide a tool that allows people to check
that their repo is ready to be submitted to PECL, including all the
appropriate things like buildconf works, the name of the project is
set in the appropriate place.

On signup, when someone submits a 'ready-to-ship' extension we will
have code that checks the extension for conformance, and if the
extension looks ready to go, their application is listed on a page
where anyone with PECL karma can approve or reject the application.

This would remove the bottleneck of only a few people being able to
approve the PECL accounts, while still blocking most inappropriate
signup attempts.

# Change voting rights

Getting a pecl account would explicitly no longer give or require a
php.net account, and wouldn't confer voting karma. To be clear, I am
actually unsure whether it's intended for people with PECL accounts
should get voting karma; I know some people did but apparently not all
have.

Although giving those a php.net account and voting karma is
appropriate for extensions that are widely used, it is not appropriate
for extensions that belong to a company and don't represent a wider
community interest to automatically get a php.net account and/or
voting rights.

For example, there are multiple extensions that allow Application
Performance Monitoring. Those extensions are not 'owned' by the
community, but instead represent a commercial interest.

Those two changes should allow extensions to be listed on PECL much
more easily, without being too disruptive to the PECL site.

Thoughts?

cheers
Dan
Ack