Friday, December 03, 2010

PHP library release survey

Tobias Schlitt is asking PHP developers and users about their preferences concerning the release process of PHP libraries. I figured I spread the word and provide you with the link to the survey.

The survey itself originates from an ongoing discussion on how to release Zeta components. It will certainly not allow to extract a generic guideline on how to release your PHP code but I think that is also not what the survey intends to do.

The central question of the survey "What is your preferred way of installing PHP libraries?" does only have one correct answer after all. But that one varies depending on the person asked and on the installation target.

"Man, I clicked this cool button on my webhosters site and now I got this webmail installed in just one go. What a nice custom installer!"
"I just love Ubuntu. I even have that on my server. If I need a PEAR IMAP library I can just apt-get install pear-horde-IMAP_Client. If I need Horde I run apt-get install horde4. And I get all the security updates automatically! Using your distribution or OS is really the only choice there is."
"I downloaded Horde and installed it on my dedicated server. Set it to run on lighty and it's blazing fast. I connected it to our LDAP user DB. Now I still need to get the Facebook and Twitter API keys so our users can connect to their accounts there. Unpacking and installing the tarballs was no major deal."
"I'm a PHP developer and I want to code a small application that needs to handle IMAP. It needs to be better than the IMAP stuff from PHP. But I don't want to code the protocol handling myself and I don't want to pull something totally unstable from a repo. And please don't give me a full framework. I just need IMAP. Oh, and in a year I might want to upgrade in case there were fixes to the package. Can I get Horde_Imap_Client via PEAR please?"
"Huh? I code Horde, I do some PEAR. Sometimes I pull stuff via the OS. For customers the tarballs are great. But at the end of the day: There is only git."

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