Need clarification on install procedure

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jul 1, 2010, at 12:15, Scott Haneda wrote:

> On Jul 1, 2010, at 6:44 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> Same for PEAR support: instead, you use the php5 port's +pear variant.
> 
> How come if you need MySql support you would do php5-mysql but if you need pear you would do php5 +pear, which seems inconsistent?  I don't care, but to a end user, it would seem more logical to be looking for php5-pear.

Completely agreed. I'd like things to be consistent and expected, and that's one reason #19091 is still not closed after a year. (It's not done.)

I would like php5 +pear to become php5-pear. Anybody interested in making that happen should feel free to do so. I personally have not had any interest in PEAR in many years which is why it is not a priority for me.

The other option is for us to say the user should install PEAR manually, and to just remove the pear variant and provide no replacement in MacPorts. The problem with PEAR that I've mentioned before is that like Perl's CPAN and Ruby's Gems, it installs things into the MacPorts prefix, which we don't want software to do. For Perl and to some extend Ruby we chose to overcome this by making individual ports for each module. We could do the same with each bit of software you can get from PEAR. But it would be a big undertaking. I'm not going to be the one to undertake it, but others should feel free to investigate it.