A Day in Paradise

This blog entry is an extension of an IRC discussion and email conversation that took place regarding the #phpc channel on Freenode.

Back in “the day” #phpc consisted of between 5 and 10 people, and as IRC channels go it was only us in there for about 2 years. This resulted in everyone getting to know each other well. As time passed the community grew organically, we had the regulars and then people who drifted in and out either asking PHP questions or just coming in to chat for a bit.

In April 2005 Davey set up the #php.thinktank channel, and the additional attention add more regulars to #phpc. By the end of 2006 #phpc participants hovered around 50.

The interaction between #php.thinktank and #phpc was good and many of the same people lurked in both groups. #php.thinktank was designed for more technical discussion, and several organized discussions took place on various technical topics. #phpc on the other hand was simply a place to hang out amongst friends.

Sometime in the beginning of 2007 the community size started to grow quickly, however the number of active participants remained roughly the same. Basically the lurkers were growing, the channel is currently about to break 100 users.

This situation brings up some special concerns.

1. is it reasonable to expect that a public IRC channel can afford you any privacy.
2. does a community that was built around “just farting around” have the right to be exclusive when they think that too many people are involved?
3. is there any reasonable way to limit the number of lurkers?

Note that when I say lurkers, I just mean people who park themselves in an IRC channel and don’t contribute to the channel. People who contribute and then go dormant for weeks/months are a different story.

I met Bertrand ‘toggg’ Gugger at LinuxTag 2005, and have chatted with him frequently on IRC since then. Yesterday I heard that toggg passed away on June 17th from a heart attack.

Toggg was a funny guy, he loved programming and being involved with the communities to which he contributed code. His grasp of written English was such that it gave way to both great comedy, and the occasional flamewar on the mailing list. He was passionate about what he worked on, and held a great grip on regular expressions.

He will be missed.

More information about the projects he was involved in here.

Tonight the frankfurt PHP User Group is celebrating their 5th anniversary! It was lots of fun knowing you all – I suddenly got a craving for Persian food – and I wish you many prosperous years.

Check out the website for meeting details. Wish I could be there.

Finally I got around to posting some of my old pictures from IPC2k4. A lot of the regulars, some faces who we haven’t seen in a while. Enjoy.

A couple blogs from back then:
http://www.wormus.com/aaron/stories/2004/11/07/php-conference-day-1.html
http://schlitt.info/applications/blog/index.php?/archives/274-PEAR-Powerworkshop-Part-II.html

Unfortunately a lot of the blogging was done on the phpconf blog which seems to be down

Disclaimer: I didn’t attend Theo’s talk, so the only information that I got was from the blog entries and slides. I realize that this short presentation was humorous, but it still brings up some points that have been nagging at the back of my head for a while now.

The comment in question is part of the Six Reasons PHP Sucks lightning talk:

PEAR
Allows PHP to exposé what are perhaps the
worst most dysfunctional and retarded code…
in an easily downloadable/installable form.

These kind of statements are nothing new. Regardless of the group of developers who work on developing and improving PEAR, the community project continues to be the object of contempt by people who prefer to write the project as something “that sucks” rather than making any contributions to bringing the project up to whatever their standard of “not sucking” is.

The core of the issue, I believe, is that people simply do not understand PEAR. To address this, I’ve written an article which will be released in the September edition of the PHP Architect magazine which aims to give better understanding of the project as well as the community infrastructure.

I would like to dedicate this blog entry to people who think that PEAR does suck, and open up the discussion to what it is exactly that sucks. PEAR has issues, but I truly believe that most of the trash talking that is done is mainly due to the ignorance. So please, if you have issues, whether technical or package specific feel free to vent here.

I’ll start the fun.

Issue: PEAR is PHP4
Resolution: All PEAR packages work in PHP5 without E_STRICT. To maintain backwards compatibility there is nothing that stable packages can do about this. However all packages moving forward will be required to run under E_STRICT PHP5.

Issue: PHP Releases were delayed or screwed up by the bundled PEAR release.
Resolution: This was fixed with PHAR archives.

Issue: The PEAR community is slow and bureaucratic
Resolution: Create your own PEAR repository

Issue: PEAR (more specifically the Date class) hinders PHP’s ability to use the class names it wants in future versions
Resolution: This is a problem. However, the popularity of the PEAR::Date class is more of a symtopm of the lack of PHP namespaces. PEAR is working to resolve this, but a simple change of the Date class name won’t help anything.