Installing PEAR on Mac OS X

An anonymous reader writes "The PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) is an online repository of high-quality, peer-reviewed PHP classes that conform to a rigorous coding standard. In this MacDevCenter article, Jason Perkins shows you how to install, configure and use the PEAR Package Manager on Mac OS X 10.2."

Word of Caution

[pudge]

The article says to do this:

% curl http://go-pear.org | php

I'd strongly recommend against that. What if the page has been hacked; or if it is a 404, or an ISP's proxy "can't get to web site" message? Safer to:

% curl http://go-pear.org > pear_install
# inspect pear_install with text editor or pager of choice
% php pear_install

Re:Word of Caution

[Anonymous Coward]

excellent idea - did you forward the suggestion to the PEAR maintainers to update their docs?

Re:Word of Caution

[pudge]

Nope!

Amazing

[Dannon]

Now, if I had a first-generation iMac and I could get OS X working on it, I could have PEAR on an Orange or Blueberry Apple.

Re:Amazing

[commodoresloat]

Just what I was thinking. As if the Mac doesn't already have a reputation for being fruity, someone goes ahead and installs PEAR. What's next, grape [uni-bonn.de]? Papaya [linux.org]? Just don't put an OrangePC card in your machine or it will turn out to be a lemon.

coding standard

[216pi]

...(PEAR) is an online repository of high-quality, peer-reviewed PHP classes that conform to a rigorous coding standard.

how come that since years, everybody talks about coding standard and I can't find the word 'documentation' in these standards?

Just a couple of hours ago I tried out the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer [php.net] (a port of perl's Spreadsheet::WriteExcel Perl). It does not contain ANY documentation. Yes, some lines are commented and most parameters are described. But you won't find a word telling you how to use it.

It's formatted nice, there are no unchecked parameters, yes, yes. but no docs. bah.

Re:coding standard

[Anonymous Coward]

They've since adopted PHPDoc (and recently moved to PHPDocumentor) that, like JavaDoc, will generate documentation from the code itself. The classes that I've tried this with are generating decent documentation (in the whole documentation is like sex, any is better than none mentality).

Re:coding standard

[jpkunst]

It's formatted nice, there are no unchecked parameters, yes, yes. but no docs. bah.

The documentation is contained in those comments. You can extract it automatically into HTML-ized documentation with PHPDoc [sourceforge.net]. It's a bit of a hassle, though, I agree that separate docs are more convenient.

documentation? bah!

[commodoresloat]

Documentation is for wimps! Read the source! If you don't understand what it does, just pretend you know what you're doing, like the rest of us. Type ./configure,make,make install and pray that you don't mess anything up. Then boldly brag to your friends that your upgraded dtags are really useful when you run xsltproc. They'll be impressed, and if they ask you what the hell that means, just huff loudly and snort, "RTFM, newbie!"

two approaches to PHP class development

[ubiquitin]

There seem to be two separate efforts to bring robust object oriented apps (classes, really ) to PHP. One of them is PEAR, and it is obviously being done in conjunction with the primary PHP development team. The other efforts is Manuel Lemos' PHPClasses.org site. [phpclasses.org] The PHPClasses site is much more grass-roots and currently has a much wider variety of classes available in it. Hopefully these groups can work together. I don't know Manuel personally, but as someone who has followed his web site for about six months or a year, I'm hoping that somebody at Zend or wherever the financial backing is behind PHP can offer this guy a job and take advantage of the momentum that he has built up. It would probably speed up the rate at which classes were submitted to pear.php.net.

What is it good for?

[4of12]

Just in case you're not familiar with PEAR and what it might be useful for, look at IMP and Horde [horde.org], a cool web-based IMAP interface.

Another word of caution

[Greedo]

The article also says:

Next you'll need to install the PHP CGI binary before you can run the PEAR Package Manager's Command Line Installer. Execute the following from a new window in Terminal to download and install the PHP CGI binary:

If you've installed a recent version of PHP from source, you should use the --enable-cli flag to configure. This will build the Apache module and a command-line version of PHP, obviating the need to download the (out-of-date) CGI they link to.

PHP may automagically do this anyway, so check first. Besides, it's probably best to have your web-server version of PHP the same as your CGI version.