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Comment by Mikushi | Hacker News Reader

While I do agree that there is a need for a real packaging system for PHP, I don't think Composer/Packagist is the answer.

Packaging is a real hard "exercise", I've dabbled with it, and it's certainly not an easy problem. Composer/Packagist is still not there yet and its ties to Symfony are "scaring" off developers (myself for example).

If it wasn't for the outdated code, the bad peer review system, PEAR is the closest thing we have, as PHP developer, of a working packaging system. If only the PHP team would invest a bit of time to modernize it and make it relevant again, I'd give it a go for sure.

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It's ties to Symfony are not that strong, and the more developers who get involved the more fair and even it will be.

If Symfony are the only framework to use it then Packist is just going to be full of their code and not a lot else.

So then you love projects like Pearfarm.com (mine), pearhub.org, etc? These are simply "open" PEAR repos a la RubyGems.

We use Pearfarm internally for all of our shared code, and it's super-easy to build and share packages.

Frankly I don't understand why something like Pearfarm hasn't been widely adopted, since it is essentially the same as RubyGems which is a completely workable solution for the ruby community.

I think people just don't understand that PEAR has 2 parts, the "installer" and the "official repo" and basically they write off anything related to PEAR.

In any case I'd love to hear your thoughts on why the community doesn't rally around Pearfarm, Pearhub, etc since they are basically the solution you're looking for.

The site needs a revamp but is there in concept. It'd only take about a days worth of time to give the site a facelift. You're missing basic things like completion of the additional instructions page.

All true. Care to help? I can make that happen!

I'd be willing to help. What are your thoughts on shifting gears towards Pyrus (PEAR2) moving forward? I'd personally like to start with the freshest of the fresh if I was going down the path of improving available package management options in PHP. My thought would be to create a wrapper around Pyrus to improve upon it.

http://pear2.php.net/

You can contact me via the email addy in my HN profile.

The only ties to Symfony are the 3 small Symfony components we used to build Composer, instead of reinventing the wheel. We're trying to build a package manager that promotes code reuse and to keep everyone happy we'd be supposed to write everything from scratch? With mentalities like that, we don't even need a packaging system in PHP, everyone just writes their own everything and that's that.

Just give it a shot, forget how it's built, use it and please give us feedback/report issues. We're improving things on a daily basis.

To those wondering how tied to symfony it is, consider this:

It uses the process, console, and autoloader components. That being said, as a user, you need not worry about that. You put the composer.phar somewhere and invoke it.

If that isn't more useable than pyrus, I'd be interested to here what is.

What specifically ties it to Symfony?

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