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Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2016 09:18:48 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Deprecate PEAR/PECL & Replace with
 composer/pickle
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

On 02/09/16 20:32, Davey Shafik wrote:
> I'm also proposing voting choices around the optional/default introduction
> of composer/pickle.

Is Composer really all there is?
I'm looking at the problems projects like tiki have with trying to keep
composer working in an active project, and other projects have just as
many bug reports of composer having failed again! Keeping the right
combination of versions of third party libraries may be what it is
intended to do, but it does not seem to achieve it.

I make no bones about the fact that I don't like the way composer works,
and warnings about "You are running composer with xdebug enabled. This
has a major impact on runtime performance." Trying to set up an
environment where composer only exists for PHP7 so it does not affect
the legacy systems seems equally problematic. And Packagist has some
many cross competing packages that it does not make providing a set of
'supported' php libraries at all feasible?

I've just tried to get owncloud running again. I had it working fine in
PHP5.3 days, but at some point an upgrade failed and while I managed to
keep it working for a bit, it was not stable. I tries again last year
but it was taking too long, so I switched tack this year, installed
clean from the distribution and while it sort of installed it will not
run and add the very thing I'm trying to restore, the mail package. I
SUSPECT it needs composer somewhere under the hood, but getting white
screen failures and no decent errors it's gone in the bin again.

If composer is to replace PEAR then it needs to be properly supported
INSIDE PHP as PEAR is and give the sort of support that PEAR currently
provides to new users. Linux distributions once again provide their own
views on how to combine composer and the other similar package managers
for javascript, python and the like with their own manager and the
situation is simply a mess! I've half a dozen package managers listed
across the whole web framework base, and composer is not top of the list.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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