PHP PEAR Questions and Answers - About IRC Classes (was Re: [PEAR-QA] HTTP

Author

About IRC Classes (was Re: [PEAR-QA] HTTP_Upload patches)

Tomas V.V.Cox

2004-06-01, 12:36 pm

David Costa wrote:
>
>
> Do you need anyone on Net_IRC ? :D
>

Seeing the status of the IRC classes:

Net_IRC: always beta, 2600 downloads, one year inactivity, no docs
Net_SmartIRC: stable status, 13000 downloads, one year inactivity, docs

IMHHO, thinking on what is best for PEAR, the actions I'd take for them
would be:

- Mark Net_IRC as deprecated
- Rename Net_SmartIRC to Net_IRC (until the Net_EvenSmarterIRC class
arraises)
- Accept developers for the class

Tomas V.V.Cox

CC'ed leads of both classes

Mirco 'Meebey' Bauer

2004-06-01, 5:33 pm

On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 17:12, Tomas V.V.Cox wrote:
> David Costa wrote:
>
> Seeing the status of the IRC classes:
>
> Net_IRC: always beta, 2600 downloads, one year inactivity, no docs
> Net_SmartIRC: stable status, 13000 downloads, one year inactivity, docs
one year no activity is wrong, look in CVS, I still put fixes and new
features into it when needed. There is no release since one year because
there was no real need, there are only 3 minor bugs. The new features in
the dev branch (CVS HEAD) are not stable enough for using as new
release, and I keep the proven stable state of SmartIRC.

>
> IMHHO, thinking on what is best for PEAR, the actions I'd take for them
> would be:
>
> - Mark Net_IRC as deprecated
> - Rename Net_SmartIRC to Net_IRC (until the Net_EvenSmarterIRC class
> arraises)
please don't forget the fact that SmartIRC is _not_ started as a PEAR
class, it was and still is a standalone project which was contributed
and also maintained in PEAR. The original naming was phpSmartIRCclass,
when it was contributed to PEAR it was accepted as Net_SmartIRC. Net_IRC
was and is a much lower level API than SmartIRC is, the approach of
SmartIRC is way different than Net_IRC. For this reasons it didn't
replace neither extended Net_IRC.

> - Accept developers for the class
I accept contributors, but not developers, I have some patches from the
SmartIRC user community (yes it exist), which are mostly new
features/enhancements. But I had no time yet for carefully checking them
and put them into the dev branch...

The situation of SmartIRC is kinda special, reason:
like I said there is a stable branch (0.5.x) and a dev branch (0.6), 0.6
contains new features which are not ready yet. In the meantime I
developed a port of SmartIRC to C# called SmartIrc4net.
That port is in real a complete rewrite of SmartIRC, the object model
completely changed. The API has a much cleaner and better approach, and
its becoming already a stable library.
(if anyone is curious about the C# port/rewrite:
http://cvs.meebey.net/SmartIRC-sharp/)

What my plans are:
bringing SmartIrc4net to a beta sate point, release it.
freeze the API, bugfix duration, porting the object modem _and_ API to
Net_SmartIRC (which will be 2 because of the rewrite).

About the PEAR_Error code, yes SmartIRC doesn't use it, when I
contributed SmartIRC to PEAR the situation and usage of PEAR_Error was
not that clear like it is today, of course I like a good exception
handling (he, since doing C# I have it native...:-P).

On my backport of SmartIRC I plan to use it of course, I will still
provide standalone versions of SmartIRC for easy/fast distribution to
smaller projects, how I will maintain them, I dont know yet.

But finally I think I can base SmartIRC fully on PEAR (probably also
other packages like PHP_Modules? or something like Net_Socket)

I hope this cleared the situation about Net_SmartIRC

>
> Tomas V.V.Cox
>
> CC'ed leads of both classes

Mirco Bauer aka meebey

Sponsored Links