by Alan Knowles (alan_k@php.net)

At present the weekly news is currently bi-weekly due to time constraints, again a busy two weeks with over 300 messages on the mailing list, and over 200 commits to CVS. some interesting discussion on PEAR package licensing, phpdocumentor, the pear web installer, a new imagick binding and 5 new packages, including Many advanced Math tools, A bar code generator and a new socket set.

PEAR-DEV traffic

Contributing to PEAR and License implications

There was considerable discussion in the last couple of weeks about including GPL'ed code in PEAR, while most developers are not keen on an outright ban, the implications of having a code library that affects applications that use it is significant, and the general consensus was that when contributing authors will be asked if they can change to the slightly more library (and more suited to libraries) LGPL license. However for PECL libraries, it is likely that accepting GP code will be impossible due to the linking requirements and incompatibility with the PHP license.

PHP Documenter now available from  PEAR

After a few efforts Greg Beaver finally got the package format sorted out, and has made available PHP Documenter available via the pear installer.

New Release of PEAR web installer

Christian Dickmann announced another release of his easy to use Web based pear installer, ideal for those using hosted solutions or just too lazy to learn the command line options. You can download it and read the instructions at
http://dickmann.homeunix.org/pear/go-pear.html

New Imagemagick bindings to replace the current PECL::imagick

Michael Montero announced a totally new binding for the imagemagick toolkit, after some discussion it was decided that it will replace the existing PECL::imagick by Christian Stocker. The new bindings offer a number of new features, however break Backwards compatibility with the previous extension. There are also plans underway to make a Object based API available as an alternative to the current classic php functional methods.

Bugs and Fixes

Thanks to these people for spotting and fixing some bugs: Thomas Schulz, Jesus M. Castagnetto, Christian Dickmann and Derick Rethans.

New and Proposed Packages

101 Maths with Jesus M. Castagnetto - Math_Complex, Math_TrigOp and Math_Quaternion

Jesus M. Castagnetto has offered a number of mathematical calculation classes, for doing Complex numbers (the square root of -1), Trigonometry and Quaternion (no I've no idea what that is..)

Mark it with Image_Barcode

Marcelo Subtil Marcal announced a library draw barcodes using the GDlib.

Sockets - a new richer set of Socket tools

Stephan Seidt announced a complete set of tools for dealing with Sockets (a good alternative to the existing Net_Socket), which can deal not only with classic TCP sockets, but also UDP and Unix domain sockets, along with the ability to implement socket servers. 

Development

Active on CVS this week has been Auth, Config, Date, DB_DataObject, Excel, File_HtAccess, HTML_Javascript, HTML_QuickForm, HTML_Select, HTML_Table, I18N,  Image_GraphViz, Log, Math_Complex, Math_Quaternion, Math_TrigOp, Math)Vecotr, MDB, Message, Net_Dict, Net_Ident, PEAR_Frontend_Web, PECL::apd, PECL::imagic, PECL::mailparse,  PECL::soap, PECL::spread, PECL::uuid, Perm_LiveUser, Validate, XML_sql2xml, XML_Transformer, XML_XSLT_Wrapper and the PEAR installer.