by Mika Tuupola (tuupola@appelsiini.net), Pierre-Alain Joye (paj@pearfr.org)
It has been a relatively busy week in PEAR land with nine new releases out of which two are totally new packages. Total number of packages is now 151. The largest category is Networking with 27 packages. Networking is followed by HTML with 15 entries and Database with 11 entries. Despite the numbers presented in here it is good to remember quality is still preferred over quantity.
There has been no press coverage this week.
If you come accross PEAR related article article feel free to send (pear-dev@lists.php.net) us the references and they will be added to the weekly news.
Lukas Smith raised his concern on uncertainty about how feature additions to PEAR DB should be handled in MDB. If MDB was to become the standard abstaction layer in PEAR it has to maintain full backwards compatibility with DB. If not, there would be more freedom in developing MDB. There is still no clear answer on what will be the final relation between DB and MDB and should MDB replace DB at some point or should their development continue on separate paths.
On another mail Lukas also pointed out that it is currently very hard to follow what packages are being proposed, accepted and for what reasons. In addition to that it seems we have been lowering our expectations and not all packages are such high quality.
As a solution to package proposal and approval problem the old idea of having a "New Package Proposal" section in PEAR website was brouht up again. New packages would be proposed and voted via this section. The current system works now, but there might be problems in the future when more developers join in.
About the quality issue it is up to PEAR developers to decide whether we prefer quality over quantity or vice versa.
Wolfram Kriesing proposed his HTML_PageHandler class which handles common tasks that occur when handling forms. The class wraps underlying class such as DB_QueryTool and calls its methods when an event such as saving, removing or editing data occurs.
Alexander Radivanovich proposed his HTTP_Session class which is an wrapper around native PHP session handling mechanisms also providing an object oriented API and database storage of sessions via PEAR DB. At the time of writing first release has allready been made.
Damian Alejandro Fernandez Sosa is developing an userland implementation of IMAP protocol which provides IMAP access to people that dont have IMAP support compiled. The class also implemets some features native imap functions do not provide.
Tim Thorpe proposed a packages which implements DES, both as a native processor or as a wrapper for libmcrypt if support for it has been compiled in.
Active on CVS this week have been: HTML_Form, HTML_Template_Xipe, Config, DB_QueryTool, HTTP_WebDAV_Server, Image_GraphViz, PEC::uuid, Auth_SAP, PEAR, PECL::ntuser, PECL::radius, Net_Ping, Tree, HTML_QuickForm, Config, HTML_Template_Flexy, HTML_Template_PHPLIB, Auth_SASL, Perm_LiveUser, PECL::cybercash, DB_DataObject, Net_Ident, Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer, Image_GIS, DB, HTML_Form, File_HtAccess, Date, PECL::namazu