Difficult deployment prevents good software from being used. Dependencies are best avoided and minimized rather than managed.
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My name is Jeff Moore. I'm a PHP programmer living in San Francico and working for a startup.
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Yeah, generally PHP developers have become used to being to unzip and go. Maybe edit a config file. Install magic can be convinient but should remain optional. It can be helpful though if you have a complex file structure which expects things to go into different places. But then it gets tricky because most PHP developers want to know where stuff is going. The big advantage of install magic imho lies with upgrade handling. Like detecting that you hand edited that file and alerting you before letting you simple overwrite it (or atleast making a backup). As for dependency handling. I think depencenies are a necessary evil which should be kept to a minimum. However redundant code is even more evil, as it will make it a nightmare to create a consistant framework. Remember with every implementations you get quirks, code you need to maintain, real bugs etc. So I think there is alot of benefit with installers. The key thing is to allow the unzip and go way as well.