Currently, it is quite difficult to signup to get a PECL account. We have a a somewhat deliberately obtuse form to signup through, which then needs to be manually approved by someone with the appropriate karma. Over the past year two people who I know from the community have reached out to me to ask "we've submitted our account application, how do we get approved now", after their application has sat unactioned for weeks.
I would like to suggest the following changes both to allow it easier to publish PECL extensions, and also prevent that causing problems.
Allow people who want a PECL account to submit a link to github repo (or alternative VCS provider) that contains a 'ready-to-ship' PHP extension repo.
We (or probably, I) will provide a tool that allows people to check that their repo is ready to be submitted to PECL, including all the appropriate things like buildconf works, the name of the project is set in the appropriate place.
On signup, when someone submits a 'ready-to-ship' extension we will have code that checks the extension for conformance, and if the extension looks ready to go, it is listed on a page where anyone with PECL karma can approve or reject the application.
This would remove the bottleneck of only a few people being able to approve the PECL accounts, while still blocking most inappropriate signup attempts.
Getting a pecl account would no longer give or requires a php.net account, and wouldn't confer voting karma.
Although giving those two things is appropriate for extensions that are widely used, it is not appropriate for extensions that 'belong' to a company and don't represent a wider community interest to automatically get a php.net account and/or voting rights. For example, there are multiple extensions that allow for Application Performance Monitoring. Those extensions are not 'owned' by the community, but instead represent a commercial interest.
Those two changes should allow extensions to be listed on PECL without being too disruptive.
thoughts?