There's nothing quite like having your blogging system go MIA for a while to give your community an overwhelming impression that no one is home. Thankfully; despite the radio silence between updates there's quite a lot to talk about!

The updates include mentions of several new PEPr proposals for packages related to Mercurial support, Twitter and holiday date validation. There's also a mention of the large amount of PEAR channels that are popping up and the future of PEAR in PHP 5.3+ with Pyrus.

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.

Baetle is a "bug and enhancement tracking language" project that describes the information in things like the BugZilla and Jira tracking applications.