[Kolab-devel] PHP composer and packaging

[Thomas Brüderli]

On 05.02.2014 11:32, Ralf Lang wrote:
> On 05.02.2014 11:05, Thomas Brüderli wrote:
>> Hello folks
>> 
>> With Roundcube, the Kolab Webadmin Panel, iRony and Synchroton, Kolab
>> has plenty of components aboard which are written in PHP. And 
>> obviously
>> not all of them re-invent the wheel and use external libraries to do
>> useful stuff. And, if you're familiar with PHP, you know about the 
>> lack
>> of a sophisticated package and dependency management in PHP.
>> 
>> There is (or used to be) PEAR to serve the purpose of a central 
>> package
>> repository. But unfortunately PEAR is slowly loosing its position and
>> the libraries get more and more outdated. This mainly because there's 
>> a
>> new star on the sky that obviously attracts PHP coders: composer [1].
> 
> Composer is the same story as rubygems - a dependency nightmare for
> distribution packagers with a lot of edges to look for. Composer is
> suited well for its intended use case but I doubt this is what fits
> kolab best.
> 
> In production, many business users prefer distribution-packaged 
> versions
> of applications. This said, a lot of pear project simply moved to own
> pear channels (pirum) instead of the main repository mostly due to
> coding standards reasons. Others do pear and composer in parallel.

Agreed. Going for distribution-packaged versions is certainly what we're 
looking for. The question is how to get there by still taking advantage 
of the lively microcosmos around PHP libs which are published with 
composer and how to solve the autoloading of those.

~Thomas