2006: a PEAR retrospective

2006 was an interesting year for PEAR, a number of exciting events happened both inside PEAR's workings and in PHP at large that affected PEAR. I will attempt to give my best shot at a 20-20 hindsight look back at PEAR in the past year. I am hugely biased, as I don't maintain every package in PEAR, so this will be tilted towards the packages I do maintain and use.

Rather than try to summarize the releases of the past year, I'll let the internet do it. Click "Prev" to see them in sequential order. The same goes for PEPr proposals in the past year. As usual, the pear-general list was saturated with questions about HTML_QuickForm throughout the entire year. DB_DataObject and Structures_DataGrid appear to be a close second.

The PEAR Installer started out at version 1.4.6 on January 6. Shortly thereafter, I announced that PEAR 1.5.0 will no longer support PHP 4.2.0 or older with a few responses, some intriguing but most were not perturbed by the announcement. In addition, I discovered an arbitrary code execution vulnerability in PEAR versions 1.3.5 and older. Several packages were proposed and several were voted on. Around this time, Derick announced that the CVS tag RELEASE_1_0_4 mysteriously appeared on every single file in PHP's CVS, which was traced to a release of System_Command by Jan Schneider's sleuthing. Oddly enough, there were no hangings as a result, in a nice break from the flame war traditions. Otherwise, life was pretty normal in January.

February marked the beginning of people understanding that they needed to upgrade PEAR, and we saw some really ancient versions trying to upgrade. There were a lot of releases, but otherwise was business as usual. One interesting point was raised by Lukas Smith. There has been a lot of FUD regarding performance and PEAR packages. He cleared up the confusion with a series of benchmarks proving that things are looking up for database abstraction in PEAR. Meanwhile, I got all medieval on Pierre's behind regarding PEAR_Frontend_Web, but all turned out well in the end. Bertrand Gugger got a little confused about the date of April Fool's, and posted this interesting release announcement to pear-dev, and was chastised for the confusion. Pierre stepped up to the plate and delivered a home run when he added the ability to subscribe to bugs in the PEAR bug tracker.

March started with a timid request from Stefano Rausch wondering when package stats would be back up. Later, an interesting discussion of how to detect whether a file is inside include_path appeared, with the solution that Zend_Framework coming up as a winner. The first of the licensing queries appeared, in benign form. The question of PHP License compatibility would come to a head later on in the year. There was an interesting but flawed attempt to create namespaces in PHP code which ultimately fizzled. Scott Mattocks raised an interesting chicken-and-egg problem with proposing two connected packages: what if one package is accepted and the other isn't? I answered this with fuggedaboutit, no worries, and he seemed satisfied with the response. The month ended with a brief "isn't Zend Framework just PEAR for PHP 5 without the installer?" question. Nobody answered.

April was pretty quiet, although Lukas raised the ultimately defeated question of whether packages in PEAR must be prefixed with PEAR_ or P_ or WHATEVER_. Justin answered the question "is PEAR PHP5-compatible" quite nicely. And then we went to May.

Philippe poked PEAR to remind people that Google's Summer of Code didn't have any PEAR listings yet, and Lukas stepped up to the plate. Alan and I disturbed the waters by reminding people that PHP 6.0 will most likely kill off called static methods that are not static. Surprisingly, this indirectly led to a huge broohaha on php-internals over just what E_STRICT should mean, as many developers had not noticed this subtle change. On a bright note, Igor Feghali wrote a nice message saying he was accepted into a Google SoC project for MDB2_Schema. PhpDocumentor rose from the grave to emit a new release with a buttload of fixed bugs. Then, Sebastian release PHPUnit2 version 3.0.0alpha5, which caught me off guard, as I thought PEAR had decided on requiring a new package when the major version is bumped. We all ran around like chickens with our heads cut off for a little while, and then (skipping ahead to July) Sebastian announced he was pulling PHPUnit from PEAR.

June began my long months of crazy music time, and I disappeared from the PEAR world, and for a while, from the internet. However, this didn't stop my from creating PHP_ParserGenerator and PHP_LexerGenerator in my spare time. Oh, and Joe Stump provided a rather definitive answer to the question of "isn't Zend Framework just PEAR for PHP 5?" No.

July began, as I mentioned before, with Sebastian's stunning move to make PHPUnit it's own thing outside of PEAR, taking advantage of the channels feature I introduced in PEAR 1.4.X. This was closely followed by Lukas Smith's announcement of his retirement from PEAR effective October 1, although it appears he may have changed his mind since then. The jury is still out on that front. A few other small things happened, such as Olivier's interesting and ultimately ignored idea of how to "dynamize PEAR." Alexey started off his first PEPr proposal in a while with an E_STRICT bang, which ultimately succeeded. Markus Tacker tried his hand at a PEPr proposal to prefix packages with "P_". This led to the all time highest number of comments on a proposal, dragged on for 3 months, received both more +1 AND more -1 votes than any other package or proposal in history, and ultimately flopped. Oh well. Markus also suggested setting up an SVN mirror of the PEAR repository, and was greeted with resounding silence. Tough month! Some tentative motions were made towards starting a PEAR PR group. Nothing solid came out of it, unfortunately.

August saw the release of PEAR 1.4.11, the last stable release of PEAR until I push out 1.5.0 sometime very soon (Read: 1 month or so, if we're lucky). Otherwise, a pretty normal month.

In September, Martin decided to codify the requirement that all PEAR packages reside in a public SCM due to overwhelming public support. Then, a real bombshell hit. Pierre announced his retirement from PEAR. Shortly after, Scott started what turned out to be a snowball effect drawing people I had never heard of before out of the woodwork with all kinds of new and some very interesting ideas for PEAR's direction. Of course, all he was asking was how to re-populate the PEAR Group, leading to my favorite reply from Joe Stump: "So, what does the PEAR Group do, anyways? I'm up for it" . P.S. thanks Joe, you're a good sport. Lukas provided a nice history here, and opened up the doors to thinking about a new structure for PEAR. I added my 2 cents (OK, 2 dollars). David called for a meeting with a pretty looking agenda, which never fully materialized, I suspect due to timezone differences among other things. Many people requested a wiki for PEAR, which received both positive and negative reviews. Meanwhile, some little crust-monkey managed to silently delete all files containing "log" in their name from PEAR cvs, which affected PhpDocumentor, PEAR, Log (obviously), peardoc and a lot of other places for a while. Fortunately, life continued as usual on pear-general with people asking for help and developers (Mark in this case) providing helpful answers.

October rolled around, and I kicked things off with the release of PEAR 1.5.0a1 and a little announcement that pearweb (the code running pear.php.net) is now installable using the PEAR installer. Meanwhile, Craig Constantine stepped up to provide a central place to track the improvements to pearweb. Martin very casually announced a hardware upgrade to the box behind pear.php.net, which was actually a HUGE leap forward in the speed of the machine, and in turn what is possible. After that point, all the stability issues we were experiencing with the website literally vanished overnight. Go Martin! This month was laden with tons of releases, and there were some good signs that new users are starting to at least consider security when designing apps. Well, sort of. Oh, and I released PhpDocumentor 1.3.1, which was nice if you want to document PHP5-related stuff. Christian set about a task I assigned him with zeal, and released QA_Peardoc_Coverage to show us how we're doing as packages and as developers when it comes to documenting our PEAR stuff. I finally fixed statistics for packages at the end of the month, and we went our merry way into November. Oh and I almost forgot, Packt Publishing published PHP Programming with PEAR and my book the PEAR Installer Manifesto, and Apress published Foundations of PEAR: Rapid PHP Development. I suggested we deprecate XML-RPC access for pear.php.net (not the package), and in the worst moment, Adam Trachtenberg pointed out that go-pear was broken in PHP 5.2. I hurriedly committed a fix 4 days prior to release, and yet it never made it in, so those of you suffering can download http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar or wait for 5.2.1.

November. Martin added the books I mentioned to the support page at pear.php.net. I created an interface for elections, which will be used very soon for a number of fun things (see December). Dan Convissor formally announced his being too busy for XML-RPC and DB. Other stuff happened too, I guess.

In December, I created some bug stats by package, and plopped them on each package's home page. This was pretty well-received once it got the inevitable kinks worked out. Around this same time, David Coallier and Christian came up with a nifty eye-candy google map of PEAR developers. Christian suggested we should track CVS commits, and I sort of shot it down, although if we do get a dedicated server to do the number crunching it still might work. PhpDocumentor acquired a new developer who actually does work (gasp). Next, I got a little crazy and added bug fixing stats per developer on each package's homepage. It was generally well-received, but a few objections convinced me to remove it from the package page, and leave it in the stats page. In addition, pear.php.net moved away from the dangerous cvs sync method to being synced from pear releases. As I mentioned in July, Lukas suggested PEARifying Doctrine as the PHP5 database handling package for PEAR. Finally, I proposed a constitution to define how PEAR should work, which hopefully will be voted on and decided real soon. In one of the more annoying threads of the year, Sylvain Beucler raised some of the questions that had been hashed, rehashed, and rerehashed on the php-internals list about the PHP License. In the end, Rasmus's say made the final cut and is going to be in the official FAQ. Justin went ahead and asked the GPL folks what they thought about the issue. Their reply was somewhat more succinct than we hoped for. Lastly, I committed the first working proof-of-concept of a PHP5 E_STRICT installer called "PEAR2" as a working title.

So, there you have it! 2007 will be a big year for PEAR, I hope the New Year will bring happiness to you and to your family, and that this retrospective is entertaining. I'm sure I missed some stuff, just post a comment if you see anything that should be in there.