CPAN - Taking things for granted?

[kiat]

Hi Monks,

Recently, I helped develop a site in PHP and had to write a script to output some user-supplied data in PDF.

Being so used to Perl's CPAN, I naturally thought I would be able to find some sort of PHP module to do it. So I googled...

I found two but you need to buy a commerical license to use them (http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.pdf.php and http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.cpdf.php). Not that appealing...

So I googled more and found a few others but they were all over the place - nothing like a repository site to host them.

I downloaded three (I think) and eventually got one to work.

And I suppose it wouldn't be easy to find support on the module's usage or to report bugs because of the lack of a central repository.

That brings me to CPAN.

I did a search and easily found a module that converts a document to a PDF format http://search.cpan.org/dist/HTML-HTMLDoc/lib/HTML/HTMLDoc.pm.

And that brings me to the point: I almost took CPAN for granted but I shall from now on be grateful it's there.

[zby]

It's not that comprehensive as CPAN but there is a PHP equivalent: PEAR.

[leira]

Definitely not as comprehensive. I'm glad that PEAR exists, but my experience so far shows that it's a lot less likely to have what I want than CPAN.

[kiat]

Thanks, zby!

I came across that name but at the point of searching, it didn't occur to me that PEAR was PHP's equivalent of CPAN.

Anyhow, none of my searches yielded results pointing to PEAR.