Manuel Lemos - 2013-04-17 19:08:12 -
In reply to message 1 from Markus S.It does not make sense making it available in Packagist because that site does not keep track of which users have downloaded this package, unlike what PHPClasses does. Same goes for Github.
When this package is updated here, PHPClasses notifies all users that have downloaded it, so they can immediately see what was improved and can come to download the new version if necessary.
If you look at this package page here, you can see more than 4600 real users. Those are the ones that PHPClasses notifies when this package is updated.
Automatically update packages is not wise because newer versions may break your applications. I think it is better to tell the users about new versions and let them decide if they really want to upgrade.
As for composer support, composer is limited, it does not support retrieving packages from repositories using OAuth to identify the users, so the site can still keep track of which users downloaded this package.
When composer supports OAuth maybe then is just a matter of adding a composer.json file as it can pull .zip packed packages.
As for Git, personally I do not like some of its limitations. It may be good in certain aspects but it lacks other features like real file version numbering and as well file descriptions. If you look at the source of this class you can see a comment automatically inserted with the version number . I do not think that it is possible to do with Git.
Those version numbers help users to see if they are using an older or newer version of the files even when they did not pull the package from a version control repository. This is not really a vital feature but it is helpful.
Other than that, I agree that easier collaboration would be helpful. It is on the to do list for this site to have a simpler solution, even if Git based. That will take some time though.
Meanwhile, feel free to report here any improvements that you may have done or would like to see.
Markus S. - 2013-04-17 14:40:46
