by Alan Knowles (alan_k@php.net)

This week on the PEAR development list saw more activity related to PHP 4.3 release, along with continuing discussion on Virtual File systems, LiveUser nearing it's first release, some Pear banners and dealing with Zend Engine 2 issues. Along with 8 new releases (1 stable, 2 beta, 3 alpha and 2 development), two new package proposals and peardoc2 finally hitting CVS.


New Releases

Stable

Beta

Alpha

Development



PEAR-DEV traffic

Virtual File Systems

Just a short follow up to last weeks notes on Virtual File systems, Wez Ferlong sent an email about the new streams feature in PHP4.3, which allows you to write your own File system driver in PHP, (and use the standard PHP fopen etc. commands) to access the file system.

Pear in PHP 4.3

As the release of PHP 4.3 draws nears, sorting out the last remaining issues for the release are high on the priority list, at present, the two key issues appear to be a mysterious Archive_Tar bug and final testing of the Win32 installer.

Branches for Zend Engine 2

Last week Sebastian Bergmann mentioned that he had branched PHPUnit for Zend Engine 2, and talked about generally branching packages for the new Engine. After some discussion, It was concluded that this was not the preferred method of supporting the new Engine, rather making packages work on both engines was better, however if it was really not possible then branching would have to be done.

LiveUser nearing release

Markus Wolff announced that LiveUser was nearing completion, thanking Christian, Lukas and Pierre-Alain for the their help in bringing the new authentication / Permission Framework to this point so quickly.

Some more PEAR banners

Bertrand Mansion posted a link to his PHP banner pear banner
which is available to advertise PEAR, and Colin Viebrock responded to a request for small pear icons by adding a few more to the PEAR support page. Available as Gifs and Pngs
for Pear and PECL

Bugs and Fixes

Thanks to these people for spotting bugs and sending fixes: Francisco Benza, Jason Rust, phpsurf, Paweł Gołaszewski and Urs Gehrig.

New and Proposed Packages

Message for hash calculations and HMAC signatures.

Jesus Castagnetto announced a package to create hashes using the common PHP hash functions, normally used to verify data messages.

Net_Auth_SASL

Richard Heyes announced a package to implement SASL encryption to communicate over sockets, this could then be used in common clear text protocols (eg. SMTP, IMAP and Sieve) to improve security.

Development

Active on CVS this week has been Auth_SASL, Cache_Lite, DBA, DBA_Relational, HTTP_Request, Inline_C, Log, Message, Net_DIME, Net_Ident, Net_URL, PECL::ecasound, PECL::python, Perm_LiveUser, SOAP, SOAP_Interop, SQL_Parser, Text_Password, Tree, XML_Transformer, XML_XSLT_Wrapper and the PEAR installer.

New and updated documentation

PEARdoc2 is now in CVS, under peardoc/peardoc2, so writers should now start looking at converting old documentation or writing new documentation for it.