I have a love-hate relationship with PHP’s class repository (and answer to Perl’s CPAN), PEAR. Sometimes you can find very useful, well documented and cleanly implemented packages. And obviously re-using such components is a big-win. Sadly, the quality of PEAR varies wildly and frequently I stumble upon useful looking packages that have little or, worse, no documentation. This situation, regardless of the underlying code, puts me off more than anything.

It’s odd, as writing examples and documentation is a pre-requisite for new PEAR package submissions. The question is, should the PEAR developers be more strict on what they let in?

PEAR :: The PHP Extension and Application Repository