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Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 10:09:20 +0100
Reply-To: Marcus Boerger <helly@php.net>
Message-ID: <1946534082.20051125100920@marcus-boerger.de>
To: Lukas Smith <lsmith@php.net>
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: PHP 5.1 (Or How to break tousands of apps out there)
From: helly@php.net (Marcus Boerger)

Hello Lukas,

Friday, November 25, 2005, 9:41:46 AM, you wrote:

> Marcus Boerger wrote:

>>   obviously one problem is that PEAR does ignore coding standards. Classes
>> should be prefixed in both pear and core. And neither Date nor File is in
>> any way prefixed. In th end all we see here is that we want namespaces asap.

> Err, how are we supposed to prefix PEAR::Date?

> PEAR_Date?
> Date_Date?
> Lala_Date?

> I guess only the first one is somewhat valid proposal.

> Anyways it makes absolute sense to use the best most clear class names 
> when we add functionality currently missing in PHP. Just as well it 
> makes sense for php core to do the same thing.

> The problem is just that PEAR is not part of the php development cycle. 
> So whatever API we come up with is totally ignored by php core. This may 
> be because the PEAR API sucks. It may also be caused by the fact that 
> usually our implementation will probably be written for a previous PHP 
> version.

> In a perfect world we would define an API, implement it in PEAR as a 
> testbed for interest and if we find its popular and there are 
> significant performance improvements to expect from an implementation in 
> C we take that API and implement it in C.

> However I do not see this happening ever. So I do not see a point in 
> PEAR packages claiming away nice and clear names from php core. We 
> should either cooperate on the API level or just have php core superseed 
> PEAR stuff.

> PEAR then goes and fixes whatever breakage occurs. What however would be 
> nice is some advance notice. And where is the entry in the upgrading 
> guide? Oh and for the record if there is a PEAR class by the name of 
> Date you can be sure that there is a class by the name of Date as well.

> So in conclusion its needlessly messy. I am sure other projects than 
> PEAR also have a Date class. Maybe we need to teach our users (including 
> PEAR) that they should simply stick to prefixing everything with 3-4 
> letter combinations (maybe even offer a central place to register them, 
> like we should do in the PEAR channel listing - 
> http://pear.php.net/channels/).

That conclusion means stay with date in ext/date and have pear learn the
lesson by making the same mistake in core. Once again the only solution is
namespacing.

Best regards,
 Marcus