by Alan Knowles (alan_k@php.net)

After last weeks hectic activity, this week calmed down with only 2 Stable and 2 Beta Releases, along with continuing discussion on making documentation as easy as possible, New Package Statistics, Signed Binary releases, PHPDoc back to life and 2 new C extensions in PECL.


New Releases

Stable

Beta


PEAR-DEV traffic

Ready made binaries and Package Signing

Following some discussion on IRC, Marko Karppinen posted the plans for distributing binaries of PECL (PHP extensions). Following the recent OpenSSH incident where somebody put malicious code in a source distribution, there is obviously a heightened need for additional security and checks here. For more details on the proposal please read the post here.

Making Documentation easier

Currently underway and under consideration are 3 projects to try and make writing documentation for PEAR easier.

Package Statistics Improved

Tal Peer, added a full summary for the package statistics, so you can see a list of how many times all the packages has been downloaded.

High Speed file access

After a brief discussion about performance and file reading, Tomas Cox posted a quick benchmark illustrating fread() being noticeably faster than implode('',file()).

PHPDoc back to life

The Award Winning Derick Rethans has picked up the gauntlet of fixing up PHPDoc, and is looking for suggestions about what could be added to it.

Bugs and Fixes

Thanks to these people for spotting and fixing some bugs: Paweł Gołaszewski, Thomas Schulz, James Flemer and Peter Bowen.

New and Proposed Packages

picoSQL

Bindings for the picoSQL database have been added to PECL, picoSQL is a proprietary relational database that has 'brought out into the open', with a LGPL license.

Python

John Praise Added his Python extension to PECL, enabling you to mix Python and PHP, and access Python variables from PHP.

Development

Active on CVS this week has been PECL::picoSQL, PECL::python, Cache_Lite, DB, MDB, PHPDoc, Archive_Tar, Mail, Auth, HTML_TreeMenu, HTML_JavaScript, Net_Pop3, Net_Sieve, Net_URL, Pager, Mail_Mime, HTTP_Request, Tree, Math_Vector and Science_Chemistry.