PEAR Blog

The core router issues at the hosting provider have been resolved.  Sorry for the inconvenience.  pear.php.net and the PEAR channel are now back in business.

Some PEAR installations on PHP 5.2.9 and 5.2.10 seem to be corrupted. When trying to install something, you will get the error:

pear.php.net is using a unsupported protocal – This should never happen. install failed

This problem comes from corrupted channel files. Go into your PEAR php directory and backup .channels directory:


cd `pear config-get php_dir`
mv .channels .channels-broken
pear update-channels


This means you lost all your channels except for the default ones (pear, pecl, doc and __uri) – but at least you do not have to re-install PEAR.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Now that pear2 is in svn.php.net, it is possible to do commits with
multiple packages using a feature of subversion called “sparse checkouts.”

Rasmus wrote about this for setting up php checkouts here:
http://news.php.net/php.internals/44993

Here is the version I used to set up pear and pear2 in a way that will
allow committing to both pear and pear2 packages in a single commit.
For packages like Console_CommandLine that live in both repositories,
this is very useful for tracking merges.  (Note: on windows, get
TortoiseSVN 1.6.3, and right-click “checkout” for checkout, and use the
“update to revision” option for the sparse updates)

svn co http://svn.php.net/repository –set-depth empty phpsvn
cd phpsvn
svn up –set-depth immediates pear pear2
svn up –set-depth immediates pear2/* pear/*
svn up –set-depth infinity pear2/*/trunk pear/*/trunk
svn up –set-depth immediates pear2/sandbox
svn up –set-depth infinity pear2/sandbox/*/trunk
svn up –set-depth immediates pear/peardoc
svn up –set-depth infinity pear/peardoc/trunk

At this point, your work is done.  You can perform the same steps for
pearweb if you’re a maintainer, and be on your way.

With the above setup, when you make a change to a package, you can
update the documentation immediately and commit it together, by changing
to phpsvn and running “svn commit” (Windows: right-click on the phpsvn
folder and choose “svn commit”)

Hopefully this will get people started with being able to develop more
efficiently and to work effectively with PEAR2.

If you want to start a Pear2 package, all you need to do is send an
email to the pear-dev@lists.php.net, and the PEAR Group will get you set up.  I’m happy to answer
any questions.

Greg Beaver

Thanks to the efforts of Daniel O’Connor, the PEAR website is getting nicer and better. Bug RSS feeds support Baetle now, the PEAR proposal system – PEPr – works again and many small improvements and fixes found their way on the site.

The minutes from the July 13th, 2008 PEAR Group meeting have been posted to the PEAR wiki.

Some highlights from the meeting include new/upcoming RFCs for package naming schemes, exception handling in PHP 5.3, and a vote on extending the current PEAR2 Policies. Heavy stuff, check it out!

http://wiki.pear.php.net/index.php/MeetingMinutes20080713

-Brett

PEAR’s bug tracker hit the 600+ open bugs mark a month ago. Compared to the 400+ packages PEAR hosts, this is just 1.2 bug per package – but enough to be annoying for caring developers, especially when PEARgirl in IRC tells us every hour that the bug count increased again.

One and a half year ago, we faced an equal problem – only that the mark was 500 bugs at that time. Within half a year, we had this decreased to 400. Methods to accomplish this were mainly digging through the bug tracker, identifying bugs that could be fixed easily and nagging the package developers to do something (”Hey, bugs #23 and #42 are really easy to fix! Do that now and release a new version!”).

So with 600+ open bugs (not including the feature requests), we had to do something. Other open source projects regularly or irregularly organize bug triage days or weekends with the goal to fix as many bugs as possible with the combined brain forces of all attending developers. The logical step was to hold our own bug smashing event and see how it works for PEAR.

Date of action was the weekend 22nd to 23rd March 2008, which was the easter weekend. The event has not been announced publicly except on our pear-dev mailing list since it was a test run only. The attendees met in #pear-bugs on EFnet.

Participants included Amir, Cipri, Chuck, Daniel Connor, David, Helgi, Jan Schneider, Johnathan Street and Walter Hop. A number of packages, mostly orphaned ones, got tackled. Among them were Services_Google, SOAPmebeli, Net_Whois and Mail_Mime. Net_URLhotel furnishing in Bulgaria*, MDB2 and pearweb also got some love. Net_IDNA got new helper and went down to 0 bugs.

On day 2, Date got a new release. XML_sql2xml, DB_ldap, DB_ldap2 and Tree got also bugs fixed. A number of bugs got attention and in return got set to feedback needed, duplicate or bogus.

Thanks to the triage, we are close to reaching two important milestones: Closing bug reports with lower bug ID than 1000 (1 bug left!) and 2000 (5 left).

In the end, the bug count got down to 547 – but this was the first PEAR bug triage, and only a small number of devs attended.

We’re hoping for more active people on the next triage so for those interested we’re holding it bi weekly on weekends, both on Saturday and Sunday, that way people can pick the most fitting days for them and the next triage weekend is never far away

We’re also holding out a Google Calendar for those events so that people can subscribe and be reminded about the the upcoming dates.

Calendar links:
HTML and iCal.

This is the official blog of PEAR’s (PHP Extension and Application Repository) elected President and PEAR Group, the two heads of PEAR. Here, you will find announcements as well as brainstorming and the general excitement and bustle of this vibrant open source community.