by Alan Knowles(alan_k@php.net)

With 5 new releases this week, including the Second MDB Release Candidate, along with 2 new packages, PEAR continues to grow heavily benefiting from new contributors sending code, bug fixes and new ideas. The eternal problem of documenting this growing collection of tools is being attacked on many fronts with phpdoc to docbook tools, and OpenOffice converters. This week, existing classes like Auth/Permissions, Config have been re-examined and plans are underway for major improvements. Meanwhile, Rasmus has been helping out with the issues of licensing conflicts with GPL code.


New Releases

Stable

Beta

Alpha

Development


PEAR-DEV traffic

Follow ups from previous weeks

A lot of discussion followed on from last weeks topics, including Math_Vector, Math_Distance and The Bulk emailing was built as Mail_Queue, conflicts in System with the New Zend Engine and Wolfram continued to look into the issues of PHPUnit being to accurate for it's own good

PHP docu integration into PEAR

As it generally appears that phpdoc has been lacking in momentum, and PhpDocu is becoming the defacto standard for generating phpdoc output, after a few messages with the phpdocu team, it looks as if phpdocu will be adopted as the new API documentation tool for PEAR, and plans are underway to integrate it as a PEAR package.

New API for Config Class

Bertrand Mansion has been making changes and extending the functionality of the Config Class. This major change will make use of the PEAR installers ability to cope with installing old and new packages, as this change would break backward compatibility

Perm_LiveUser now in CVS

Marcus Wolff has added Perm_LiveUser to CVS, following a little fun getting the naming right. Meanwhile Lukas Smith has also been working on Perm_LiveUser solving situations where Administrators change the permissions of a user, while they are logged in.

Language Detection on the Weekly News

Wolfram Kriesing suggested using the new I18N_Negotiator to help determine the language used to display the weekly news. Assuming we can get this package installed on the PEAR server, Alan was keen to see it being employed. This means that if you have a default language set in your browser then it would automatically show you the right page. Ondrej Jombik suggested using the Net_Geo or something similar to determine country from IP addresses, Alan was not that keen as being in Hong Kong he would get Traditional Chinese (which he cant read), so preferred to let the user decide manually using the browser settings.

MDB Release Candidate 2

Lukas Smith announced that he had finished off Release Candidate 2 of the Metabase PEAR DB merger project, which included changes to the manager and an improved xml schema parser. He was hoping to get feedback (quickly) so he could finalize the full 1.0 release next week.

PECL::Smbclient GPL issues

Jelmer Vernooij's smbclient extension was committed into PEAR, drawing concern about the issues of dealing with GPL code that was linked with PHP. As PHP itself is under a BSD style license, linking GPL code into it causes license problems. These are similar to the issues that the Mozilla Project had incorporating GPL work, and eventually lead it to a Triple licensing scheme. Rasmus had put a note in the PEAR FAQ concerning this, and while generally where possible avoid linking against GPL work (LGPL is OK). The only way out of this may be to get a special 'grant' from the Samba team to allow smbclient to be linked against Jelmer's extension.

Bugs and Fixes

Alot of Bugs and Fixes where added this week, Thanks to these people for spotting them, Chuck Hagenbuch, Adam Maccabee Trachtenberg, Keith Schoenefeld, Paweł Gołaszewski, Ondrej Jombik, Tabata Tomoyuki, Aaron Hawley

New and Proposed Packages

Net_IPv4, calculating broadcast, and network addresses

Eric offered a small package that can do Network Calculations, this got no objections, so we look forward to having yet another useful tool in PEAR.

Benchmark_Profiler

Mathias Englert announced a Benchmark_Profiler, which although similar to Benchmark_Timer, had some added advantages for tallying up time spent within methods or functions.

Development

Active on CVS this week has been Auth, Cache_Lite, DB_DataObject, Image_Transform, Math_Vector, MDB, Net_CheckIP, Net_DNS, NetIPv4, PECL::smbc, PECL::tclink, Perm_LiveUser, PHPDoc, SOAP, Tree, Validate.

New and Updated Documentation

Changes and additions to PECL::Soap, Net_IPv4 and pear documentation should show up this week.