by Alan Knowles(alan_k@php.net)

While the mailing list was slightly quieter, if only because everybody was busy packaging and releasing. This week saw 6 stable, 2 beta and 1 development release, MDB's first stable release, Some discussions on how to use PEAR if you are in a hosted enviroment and some exciting new packages proposed like Christian Stocker Webdav Server Class.


New Releases

Stable

Beta

Development


PEAR-DEV traffic

PEAR Licence FAQ

Rasmus Lerdof announced that he was adding a more comprehensive list of licences for PEAR packages, based on a request by Richard Stallman. These are OSI (Open Source Institute)  and FSF (Free Software Foundation) approved licenses. They should appear in the manual soon.

PEAR Config new Parsers

Bertrand Mansion announced he had revamped the Config class, added a number of new backend parsers and changed the current ones. This does break backwards compatibility, so if you rely on the old version you will have to make sure you tell the pear installer which version you require.

MDB manager abstract

Lukas posted a summary of the MDB manager layer, which helps explain some of the differences and advantages of moving to MDB, the Metabase PEAR merger project, he has also been working on some documentation that will help anyone wishing to write a backend driver for MDB.

Tomas V. Cox away for the next few weeks

Tomas Cox, one of the core developers behind PEAR, announced he will a little busy in the next few weeks. A few jokes followed about slipping stuff in while he's away..

Phpdoc2peardoc

Alexander Merz announced the first version of a tool to convert phpdoc comments in the source into peardoc (for the pear manual), it involves a small amount of changes to phpdoc, but is a great step forward to improving the usablility of PEAR packages.

Getting PEAR to work outside the PEAR tree.

Peter Schoenster, while attempting to install DB_DataObjects, brought up the issue of how to install pear packages outside of the default pear tree, quite a common requirement when working on hosted servers. a number of options are available for this.
pear config-set php_dir /where/i/want/pear
will change the installation target directory for the current user,

Download the needed packages and untar the files in a folder available in your include_path.
To set up your include path, you can use ini_set('include_path','/where/i/put/pear');, this command should be added by an auto_prepend script, or simply in a common config file you include in each pages (require_once 'config.inc.php', by example)
Use a .htaccess file with  php_value include_path /where/i/put/pear

Bugs and Fixes

Thanks to these people for spotting bugs and sending fixes: Paweł Gołaszewski, Michael Dransfield, Jeremy Pointer, Alexy Borzov.

New and Proposed Packages

DB_DOM, or DB_XML 

Sandro Zic announced a class that enables you to store an xml document model (DOM), in a database using PEAR::DB, it's API is similar to php's domxml extension, and should enable faster access to large xml documents.

HTTP_Webdav_Server

Christian Stocker announced his webdav server package, which enables php4.3 (currently CVS version), to act as a Webdav server, the package includes an example file based Webdav Server.

Tree_Manager

Björn Schotte announce his intention to PEARify the tree_manager, there was some discussion on whether it may be better to merge this into the current existing Tree Classes.

Development

Active on CVS this week has been  Cache_Lite, DB_DataObject, DB_ldap, DBA, HTML_QuickForm, HTML_Template_Flexy, HTML_Template_IT, Image_Transform, Log, Mail_Mime, MDB, Pager, PECL::bcompiler, PECL::mailpars, PECL::threads, PECL::vpopmail, Perm_LiveUserTree, XML_Transformer and  PEAR core packages

New and updated documentation

Changes and additions to xml_transformer, contributing and the faq should show up this week.