by Alan Knowles alan_k@php.net
This week includes 3 new releases both beta and development versions, ready to be tested, Along with news on the PEAR Package Installer, Smarty and Developers Birthdays.
New Releases
Beta
MDB, the merge of PEAR DB and Metabase includes more fixes to the PostgreSQL
driver and some API cleanups, HTML_Javascript, a package to help convert
php variable for use in javascript and a few javascript tools.
Devel
DBA, a wrapper for the php DBA functions and an implementation of an SQL driver for DBA database
PEAR-DEV traffic
MDB Return by reference
There was a brief discussion on how metabase
should handle return values, it appears Metabase (what MDB is based on) tended
to return values by using return by reference eg.
getTextValue($bar, $bar_quoted);
$query = 'SELECT * from foo WHERE bar = '.$bar_quoted;
However it was considered that this method was uncommon in PEAR generally.
The current standard of returning mixed, PEAR_error or the result will still
be the prefered method for returning arguments. Meanwhile Paul Cooper has been
helping out Lukas Smith with the Postgres driver.
How will Zend Engine 2 (PHP5)'s catch/throw affect PEAR_error?
Stig is still experimenting with ZE2's try catch methods, and the future of returning PEAR_errors (for
ZE2 only packages) will be decided later (although Backward Compatibility issues will obviously be a
serious factor in this).
Installer moving forward
More testing was underway to iron out bugs with the installer, especially
on Win32 platforms, the lynx piping still has issues with Win32, the current
recommended method for installing on win32 is still.
c> lynx -source http://pear.php.net/go-pear > go-pear
c> php -d output_bufering=0 -q go-pear
Package.xml - checking consistancy
In a discussion about packaging of HTML_OOH_Forms, it was mentioned that the pear package manager can
check a package.xml using
pear pv
In this situation the reason for a package prolems was that the role for
a file in a package has to be one of these types = eg. <file role="???">filename.x</file>
php ext test doc data src script
Pear and Smarty
It was asked why Smarty http://smarty.php.net
had not become part of pear on the main pear mailing list, The reason really
revolved around the fact that nobody has really volunteered the time and
effort to pearify Smarty (and provide a BC layer).
DB::Sybase
Antônio Carlos Venâncio Júnior, has been doing bits of
work with the DB::Sybase component of the DB abstration layer and asked if
anyone was available to help test it. He has also been helping out adding
phpdoc comments.
PEAR Manual and Birthdays
Alexander promised to try and have the new pear manual working for his birthday on the 25th (and Thomas Cox's
is on the 24th) - If PEAR has helped you, have a look at their wishlists.
The result of these manual fixes should mean that a more indepth documentation
can be done for each package, and the Manual Navigation should work alot
better.
Proposed Packages:
Sebastião Rocha has proposed a Report generator class some of the ideas are layed out
at http://www.i-node.com.br/report
Development
Active on CVS this week has been DB, DB_DataObject ,
DBA, HTML_Javascript, HTML_OOH_Form, HTML_QuickForm, Log, Mail_Mime, MDB,
Net_NNTP, PEAR_Frontend_Gtk, PECL/soap, PHPUnit, SOAP, XML_Tree, XML_XPath,