The issues

For PEAR to continue to grow, and encourage contributors, testers, writers and users. It is important (in the view of the RFC author) to make the decision process within PEAR to be as open and fair as possible.

Due to historical issues of long, rather pointless, and heated discussions on the pear-dev mailing list, Some rules have been made in the privacy of the pear-group mailing lists with little consultation with the community at large. This, (in the view of the author of this RFC) is something that is a serious mistake and must strongly be prevented in the future.

To summarize the problem

1. No formal procedure for proposing and approving RFCs has been available.

2. Public RFC's (or ideas) previously have ended up in 'flamewars' and pointless discussions.

3. Long nested threads can become difficult to summarize, when the aim is to produce a consensus building document.

4. This public battering has discouraged contributors to put forward ideas to improve PEAR, or even keep subscribing to pear-dev.

5. It is impossible to gauge the community support for rules that have been decided and enforced by the pear group.

6. Without clear wide ranging support, rules, guidelines will never represent the view of all users and contributors to PEAR.

(RFC = Request for comments) for those who are wondering..