by Alan Knowles(alan_k@php.net)
With 5 new releases this week, including the Second MDB Release Candidate,
along with 2 new packages, PEAR continues to grow heavily benefiting from new
contributors sending code, bug fixes and new ideas. The eternal problem of
documenting this growing collection of tools is being attacked on many fronts
with phpdoc to docbook tools, and OpenOffice converters. This week, existing
classes like Auth/Permissions, Config have been re-examined and plans are
underway for major improvements. Meanwhile, Rasmus has been helping out with
the issues of licensing conflicts with GPL code.
New Releases
Stable
- Net_IPv4 - A class to do calculations on IP address (like broadcast etc.)
Beta
- DB_DataObject - An SQL builder and Data Modeling Layer.
- Math_Vector - Classes to represent Vectors in 2D, 3D, etc.,
along with classes to perform operations on the vectors
- Tree - An easy way to manipulate Tree like data, from XML files or Databases
Alpha
- Validate - A set of methods to enable checking of data (like numbers, email, credit cards etc.)
Development
- MDB - Release Candidate 2 of the PEAR MDB, Metabase Merger Database Abstraction Layer.
PEAR-DEV traffic
Follow ups from previous weeks
A lot of discussion followed on from last weeks topics, including
Math_Vector, Math_Distance and The Bulk emailing was built as
Mail_Queue, conflicts in System with the New Zend Engine and
Wolfram continued to look into the issues of PHPUnit being to
accurate for it's own good
PHP docu integration into PEAR
As it generally appears that phpdoc has been lacking in
momentum, and PhpDocu is becoming the defacto standard for
generating phpdoc output, after a few messages with the phpdocu
team, it looks as if phpdocu will be adopted as the new API
documentation tool for PEAR, and plans are underway to integrate it
as a PEAR package.
New API for Config Class
Bertrand Mansion has been making changes and extending the
functionality of the Config Class. This major change will make
use of the PEAR installers ability to cope with installing old and
new packages, as this change would break backward
compatibility
Perm_LiveUser now in CVS
Marcus Wolff has added Perm_LiveUser to CVS, following a little
fun getting the naming right. Meanwhile Lukas Smith has also
been working on Perm_LiveUser solving situations where
Administrators change the permissions of a user, while they are
logged in.
Language Detection on the Weekly News
Wolfram Kriesing suggested using the new I18N_Negotiator to help
determine the language used to display the weekly news. Assuming we
can get this package installed on the PEAR server, Alan was keen to see
it being employed. This means that if you have a default language set in
your browser then it would automatically show you the right page.
Ondrej Jombik suggested using the Net_Geo or something
similar to determine country from IP addresses, Alan was not
that keen as being in Hong Kong he would get Traditional Chinese
(which he cant read), so preferred to let the user decide manually
using the browser settings.
MDB Release Candidate 2
Lukas Smith announced that he had finished off Release Candidate 2
of the Metabase PEAR DB merger project, which included changes to
the manager and an improved xml schema parser. He was hoping to get
feedback (quickly) so he could finalize the full 1.0 release next
week.
PECL::Smbclient GPL issues
Jelmer Vernooij's smbclient extension was committed into PEAR,
drawing concern about the issues of dealing with GPL code that was
linked with PHP. As PHP itself is under a BSD style license,
linking GPL code into it causes license problems. These are similar
to the issues that the Mozilla Project had incorporating GPL work,
and eventually lead it to a Triple licensing scheme. Rasmus had put
a note in the PEAR FAQ concerning this, and while generally where
possible avoid linking against GPL work (LGPL is OK). The only way
out of this may be to get a special 'grant' from the Samba team to
allow smbclient to be linked against Jelmer's extension.
Bugs and Fixes
Alot of Bugs and Fixes where added this week, Thanks to these
people for spotting them, Chuck Hagenbuch, Adam Maccabee
Trachtenberg, Keith Schoenefeld, Paweł
Gołaszewski, Ondrej Jombik, Tabata Tomoyuki, Aaron
Hawley
New and Proposed Packages
Net_IPv4, calculating broadcast, and network
addresses
Eric offered a small package that can do Network Calculations,
this got no objections, so we look forward to having yet another
useful tool in PEAR.
Benchmark_Profiler
Mathias Englert announced a Benchmark_Profiler, which although
similar to Benchmark_Timer, had some added advantages for tallying
up time spent within methods or functions.
Development
Active on CVS this week has been Auth, Cache_Lite,
DB_DataObject, Image_Transform, Math_Vector, MDB, Net_CheckIP,
Net_DNS, NetIPv4, PECL::smbc, PECL::tclink, Perm_LiveUser, PHPDoc,
SOAP, Tree, Validate.
New and Updated Documentation
Changes and additions to PECL::Soap, Net_IPv4 and pear
documentation should show up this week.