by Alan Knowles (alan_k@php.net)

Another quiet week, as a number of the PEAR developers are preparing for the forthcomming PHP conference in Frankfurt (come and see the warm bodies behind all that code). Discussion on the dirname(__FILE__) issue continued, with the original Architect explaining the reasoning behind the design decision. Three new packages where proposed this week, as PEAR continues to attract the best quality PHP code and extensions, along with a continuing flow of new releases 4 stable, and 4 beta.


New Releases

Stable

Beta


PEAR-DEV traffic

PEAR paths in require_once, and using dirname(__FILE__) continued

Following last weeks discussion on using dirname(__FILE__) for paths, Stig Bakken pointed out the serious problems of using this in conjunction with multiple PEAR installations (eg. a global + user one). The problem being that require_once, would become seriously confused and may end up loading 2 classes with the same name from 2 different files, hence causing a conflict. The current method of letting the include path sort this out is the only currently viable solution.

New MDB containers for PEAR cache and mail queue

Lorenzo Alberton announced he had written MDB containers for PEAR cache and mail queue.

User notes for the PEAR manual

It was suggested by Jon Wood, that one of the most popular feature of the PHP manual be added to the PEAR manual, although there weren't many responses. It is likely that when PEARDoc2 goes live, this will be a key feature that will be added.

Bugs and Fixes

Thanks to these people for spotting and fixing some bugs: David Viner, Daniel C, Lorenzo Alberton, Sebastian Röbke, Mika Tuupola, Alan Richmond and Robin Ericsson


New and Proposed Packages

APC (Advanced PHP Cache) now in PECL

George Schlossnagle announced his intention to add APC, a freely available PHP cache to PECL.

ezSQL - a simplified Database API

Justin Vncent proposed his simplified Database API for PEAR, after some confusion about how it would fit into PEAR. A general consensus that this kind of wrapper as an extension to DB or MDB may be of some use to some users. Although the purists amount the pear developers where not that keen on the over-hiding of the database connection details.

Net_Cyrus - an interface to the Cyrus IMAP server managment commands

Richard Heyes proposed a package to provide an interface to the Cyrus IMAP mail server, enabling the adding users, and changing their access rights.


Development

Active on CVS this week has been Benchmark, Cache, DBA_Relational, File_Find, HTML_QuickFrom, HTML_Table, Image_Transform, Inline_C, Log, Mail_Queue, MDB, PECL::bcompiler, PECL::python, Perm_LiveUser, Scince_Chemistry, SOAP, SQL_Parser,along with updates to PEARDocc2, including file and the FAQ.