phpDocumentor and PEAR - interesting crossing of paths

Yesterday and today I released phpDocumentor 1.3.0RC6. Aside from a number of exciting features and many important bug fixes, including some bugs opened over 2 years ago (!) this release is unique in another way: in addition to working as a PEAR-installable package, it also works as an extracted file.

This is a subtle but revolutionary change. In order to do this, we have to take advantage of some interesting possibilities that package.xml 2.0 provides. In fact, I designed several of the features of package.xml 2.0 to support this duality. In particular, it is possible to bundle a file and completely ignore it. We use this feature to handle the duality of the "phpdoc" command itself.

When installed through PEAR, a file named "pear-phpdoc" is installed as "phpdoc", and if installed on windows, "pear-phpdoc.bat" is installed as "phpdoc.bat." Also bundled in the archive are the original "phpdoc" and "phpdoc.bat" commands needed to run phpDocumentor out of the box just by extracting the archive. These files are simply ignored by the PEAR installer.

Another feature unique to package.xml 2.0 that makes this possible is the usage of package-time file tasks. In particular, the replace task, which is used to set the version of phpDocumentor as displayed by the actual generation and the docbuilder web interface.

In addition, I finally updated the manual at http://www.phpdoc.org/manual to the current version.

So in short, things are coming together finally.