by Alan Knowles(alan_k@php.net)

This week has seen a flood of new package proposals, PEAR continues to grow into a high quality library of PHP code and extensions. This week sees 1 new Releases, along with 6 proposed packages and news on peardoc2, working through issues with environment variables in system and a steady flow of CVS commits.


New Releases

Stable


PEAR-DEV traffic

PEAR doc2

Plans are still underway to upgrade the pear manual into a more flexible layout, Alexander posted news of the proposed layout and source a few weeks ago, and hopefully will complete converting the documentation of the remaining few packages. So it can replace the current manual.

Notices in System.php

The system package came under the spotlight as the use of $_ENV, could not be relied upon 100% (due to a option in php.ini), and the other alternative getenv(), involved a slower function call to retrieve the data, in the end the class now goes through attempting to find the data from the fastest to the slowest source.

Syndicating PEAR Weekly News by RSS

Jesus Castagnetto suggested producing the weekly news in RSS format, so that the news can be syndicated by other sites. This sounds like a great idea and hopefully during the next few weeks the finer details can be sorted out.

Bugs and Fixes

Alot of Bugs and Fixes where added this week, Thanks to these people for spotting them, Bjoern Frantzen, Ondrej Jombik, David Jean Louis, ,Jeroeon Derks, Hakan Kuecuekyilmaz, Arnaud Limbourg, Kubo Atsuhiro.

New and Proposed Packages

An Alternative Auth

Wolfram Kriesing Proposed an alternative Auth Class, this one focuses on the checking of Authentication against a number of back-ends, including Databases, ldap, NIS, SOAP (and quite a few more). It also has a number of features for dealing with directory level authentication and leaves the 'login page' location and look up to the user.

APD, the Advanced PHP Debugger extension

George Schlossnagle proposed moving the APD php extension into PECL, after a fanfare of votes for it, it can now be found in the PECL directory in CVS. APD features profiling and back-trace support, along with remote program stepping.

Metar Weather reading

Yavor Shahpasov proposed a new class for reading weather information from Metar weather sources, after some discussion, naming it Weather_Metar currently is the favored name for this package.

Ogg Vorbis PHP extension

Dave Broudy announced a php extension to read data from ogg vorbis files (like mp3's), this was accepted and should appear in CVS shortly.

An alternative Excel writing package

Xavier Noguer offered a new implementation of the File_Excel class, Although not complete he believed it was further along than the current File_Excel. Mike Tuupola responded by saying due to a lack of time he had been unable to get much further with the original File_Excel, and was willing to have it replaced with this new implementation.

Gnu PGP extension for PECL

Patrick O'Lone offered a binding to the Gnu PGP Made Easy Library, this (like the smbclient class) has some issues with GPL code, that need to be resolved first, but hopefully if that can be worked out this would make another great extension for PHP.

Development

Active on CVS this week has been Auth, Auth_HTTP, Benchmark, Cache_Lite, DB, DB_DataObject, DB_ldap, DBA, HTML_QuickForm, HTML_Template_Flexy, Image_Transform, Log, Mail, MDB, PECL::imagick, Perm_LiveUser, PHP_Doc, PHPUnit, Tree, XML_Transformer,

New and Updated Documentation

Changes and additions to xml_Transformer, db_DataObject, PECL::SOAP and PECL:APD should show up this week.