Honestly I learned about the PHP mongo extension by going to MongoDB's website & reading how to get it to work. My first thought was not to do 'pecl install mongo'. This probably has more to do with 10gen taking the effort to write a proper extension for PHP rather than letting the community come up with a module for node.js. Also I don't think node has had time to "settle" since it's still evolving, so you'll experience package fragmentation like what you see with mongo.
I do agree that along with package management there should be a strong community/social component involved that critiques & communicates about packages available.
Comments
Honestly I learned about the PHP mongo extension by going to MongoDB's website & reading how to get it to work. My first thought was not to do 'pecl install mongo'. This probably has more to do with 10gen taking the effort to write a proper extension for PHP rather than letting the community come up with a module for node.js. Also I don't think node has had time to "settle" since it's still evolving, so you'll experience package fragmentation like what you see with mongo.
I do agree that along with package management there should be a strong community/social component involved that critiques & communicates about packages available.