by Alan Knowles (alan_k@php.net)

Always a busy week in PEAR world, with 5 new releases, and 2 new packages added, along with discussion on the status of the pear web site, Forum coming back to life, and an MDB release candidate.


New Releases

Stable

Beta

Development



PEAR-DEV traffic

Finding the Package list

There was a small discussion about displaying the link for the package list on the front page of the pear website. This issue is tied up with the fact that for current PHP releases, the only way to use the pear installer is to use
lynx -source http://pear.php.net/go-pear | php
Whereas, when PHP 4.3.0 is released, this will no longer be required (the installer will come with the PHP distribution), so using and accessing PEAR packages will become considerably easier. Also as the site is still undergoing slight changes it would be better to present a fully working distribution system, rather than oversell the PEAR packager while it is still has a few minor problems. So in the meanwhile, to see the pear website in it's full glory you should use this address, and then refresh the page.
http://pear.php.net/?devme
One of the more annoying of these problems was fixed this week by Tomas Cox, thanks to some diligent bug fixing, the process of creating a new package, and uploading the first release is now considerably smoother.

Yet more languages for the weekly news.

Jesus M. Castagnetto, (co author of Professional PHP Programming and a few PEAR packages), has started the Spanish translations of the weekly news.

MDB Release Candidate 1

Lukas Smith announced that he considers MDB, the Metabase/PEAR DB merger ready for beta testing, and was looking for any gaps that need to be filled before declaring a 1.0 release.

PHP Category starts to get filled

After a bit of discussion, Frederic Poeydomenge's Var_Dump Got uploaded into the new PHP Category, along with PHPDoc, PHPUnit and bcompiler moved out of the PEAR category. Var_dump however still needs renaming to fit in with the PEAR naming standards, eg. PHP_VarDump or PHP_Var_Dump.

More Zend Engine 2 issues

Brad Bulger spotted that using the new Zend Engine, has some interesting side effects, that are probably worth keeping an eye out for. The issue he found was tha the mkdir method in the System Package, has the same name as a standard PHP function, since you don't need to use $this->mkdir() anymore to call a local method in ZE2, the Engine was confusing mkdir (the system call) for mkdir the method call...

Forum comes back to life

Radek Maciaszek asked if he could take over some of the development of the Forum package, converting it more to PEAR standards and adding a few features. As usual this was met with much fanfare and encouragement.

Docbook made easy - OpenOffice XSLT

Sandro Zic popped up to mention that there are already OpenOffice to Docbook XSLT converters available at http://www.chez.com/ebellot/ooo2sdbk/, if anybody wants to try it, the PEAR community would be very keen to see the results.

Bugs and Fixes

Thanks to these people for spotting and fixing some bugs, James Flemer, Mika Tuupola, Matt Allen, Rob, Pierre-Alain Joye, Arnaud Limbourg,Troels Arvin and Wim Vinckier

New and Proposed Packages

Var_Dump

Var_dump is a more detailed and elegant var_dump() to output variables. At the moment it is focused on HTML output.

PECL::Threads

After finally working out the technical issues behind adding Threading support to PHP, Alan Knowles and Shane Caraveo have now a roughly working prototype in PECL, this is a cross platform extension that at the moment allows you to start another thread in php using the include type syntax, and pass variables between both threads. Extremely useful for developing TCP type servers or GTK applications.. A more standard thread_create('function_name'), type interface is also underway.

Development

Active on CVS this week has been MDB, HTML_Javascript, HTML_Post, DB_DataObject, PECL::Threads, I18N, Console_Getopt, Cache_Lite, Auth, DB, Date, HTML_QuickForm, DB_ldap, HTTP_Upload, Math_Numbers and Net_Ping.