Lot 49: Greg Beaver's blog

It's official, the PEAR Installer Manifesto, a book I just finished on the PEAR Installer will be released by Packt Publishing next week. This book originally started as two chapters in the recently released PEAR Book. After receiving the first chapter, a 70-page behemoth on the features available in package.xml version 2.0, the publisher decided this was too exciting and should be its own book.

I wrote a total of 6 chapters for a total of 270 pages (and yes, the 70-page behemoth has been split into two smaller, much more manageable chapters). Each chapter explores a different aspect of the PEAR Installer, and it goes much further than any previous text on fully taking advantage of its features. Radical ideas such as using the PEAR Installer to maintain a live website (as we will soon do with pear.php.net itself), and embedding the PEAR Installer directly inside a web application are explored in detail with sample code needed to actually do it. One common question - whether one can distribute a closed-source or otherwise restricted application using the PEAR Installer - is also answered with actual code showing how to do it.

To be honest, I was a little surprised by the choice of the title (I suggested another title) as it comes off a bit stronger than I feel totally comfortable with.  However, the truth is that I am a rather vocal advocate for the benefits of the PEAR Installer, and this text captures the reasons for that as well as providing a helpful reference for "everything PEAR Installer." So, manifesto or not, this is a comprehensive guide that will challenge the way you think about developing in PHP.  I hope you will find it useful, I put lots of hours into writing both the PEAR Installer and this book on how to use it.

Until it is published next week, you can pre-order it directly from Packt at 20% off.

After 3 grueling days of work, statistics are finally back up and running for pear.php.net, and are running fast at pecl.php.net.  You can see the results in action at http://pear.php.net/package-stats.php.

The saga of converting the stats started with figuring out how to process the 27 million records of the downloads table, and convert them into something more manageable.  The solution aggregates downloads into a table of per-release/per-month counters, and pairs with the existing package_stats table that aggregates per-release of all time to deliver blazing performance on download statistics with instantaneous updates as downloads occur.

There were some scary moments, like when I accidentally set all of the download stats prior to october to the same value, and then proceeded to erase my local copy of all stats prior to october in a brilliant stroke of SQL.  Fortunately, while re-dumping the downloads table in order to re-create the aggregated stats, I discovered a pre-existing dump of the pre-october aggregated stats data and simply synced it into the mysql server, saving the day.

This would not have been possible were it not for Lukas Smith's excellent database index debugging and suggestions of how to implement the actual conversion, so a big thanks in his direction.  I think I'll go sleep now for a few days.

Today, I was trying to approve a few comments, and discovered about 15 comments on blog entries that somehow had never been marked as approved.  For many, I never received notification emails, so please accept my apologies - some of them were over a year old.

I'll try not to let that happen again!

Has anyone out there been able to get the ZDE installer to run for version 5.2.0?

I have a brand new Pentium D-based system running kubuntu and would like to get back to using ZDE on linux.  Unfortunately, it fails with an error that it can't find libc.so.6.

Tips I found regarding this error for other programs have not worked with ZDE, so I'm wondering if anyone out there has successfully installed ZDE on 64-bit after making modifications to the installer?

Thanks in advance