My understanding is that PEAR has a specific coding style and set of standards, which is different than that of MediaWiki. Also things like JSMin should not be hijacked and thrown into PEAR -- it came from http://github.com/rgrove/jsmin-php/ -- it already has a distribution chanel.
In other words, the idea of using PEAR works really well for things we took from PEAR or think we should specifically contribute to PEAR, but not for all cases that I originally presented. Moving stand-alone things into a specific place, such as what ^demon has done in r 71774, is still useful as at least a first step towards sharing and generally being better about giving back to the larger open source community.
I do however agree with Tim however that simply moving libraries to phase3/includes/libs, while introducing a more sanitary convention for 3rd party library inclusion, does not by itself raise awareness to the availability of the libraries - that part of the problem may need to be solved in multiple ways, only one of which is likely to be PEAR.
- Trevor
On 8/27/10 9:44 AM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
On 8/26/10 6:46 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
On 27/08/10 03:57, Trevor Parscal wrote:
It got me thinking that [the CSSmin class] would be pretty useful to non-MediaWiki projects too, but sadly we don't have a history of sharing in this way...
You should put it in PEAR. Very few people are going to find it if it's just in the MediaWiki core, regardless of what directory you put it in.
So, you suggest we maintain it in 2 places (where we use it in MediaWiki core and where people have access to it), and ask that others push changes back to where?
Tim's right...putting it in PEAR is a great way to signal "this is a reusable component; please reuse this".
PEAR isn't a source of truth; it's a distribution channel. In order to get discovered and used, libraries need to be in a distribution channel that people use. Many people use PEAR, other people use Linux distribution repositories.
svn.wikimedia.org would continue to be the original source repository for the library, but PEAR would be one of many distribution channels. The PEAR version would only get updated each time you release the library.
Rob _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l