About PHP packaging with composer things

[Neal Gompa]

Hey all,

Earlier today, Adam Williamson blew a gasket when trying to update ownCloud
to the newest upstream release[0]. As a user of the ownCloud package, this
is really unfortunate, as I look forward to new releases of ownCloud for
EL7 and Fedora. However, as a packager, I sympathize with him, as PHP
software has become increasingly difficult to deal with on this.

I've considered packaging some PHP based software myself; however, the
rapid adoption of Composer and the complexity of dealing with that has put
me off. What surprises me is that we don't yet have some kind of macro for
"automagically" handling the ugly composer stuff.

For example, couldn't a "%phpcomposer" macro be set up to utilize an
internal packagist that has php libraries and software installed as
BuildRequires registered to enable utilizing it locally and a helper to
generate the working autoloader necessary for being able to use unbundled
PHP libraries?

Perhaps I'm missing something that would make that idea impossible, but I'm
spitballing ideas here because it's pretty horrible that PHP software seems
to be trending towards not being packageable.

Any thoughts on how the situation could be improved so that more people
like Adam don't snap from trying to package PHP-based software?

[0]:
https://www.happyassassin.net/2015/08/29/looking-for-new-maintainer-for-f...

-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!