New from PHP Magazine today is their latest PHPBarnstormer Issue - #40.

This week's issue carries news about Andi's intentions to roll out PHP 5.1 Beta "very soon", the re-release PHP 5.0.4, and the autoload() function coming under fire on PHP-Dev. In news from the PEAR mailing list, read about the debate on whether to use PEAR CVS or not, how PHPDoc "bombed" when trying to parse a properly documented file, and the reworked PEAR installer that saves you from haiving to specify the name of the channel you want to install a package from. In PECL mailing list news, an initial version of a DB2 php extension (ibm_db2) that supports IBM Cloudscape and Apache Derby has been commited, and plans are on to commit a libshape extension. There is also a list of the latest PEAR releases, and the status of various package proposals. Read Issue #40.

Some of the PEAR packages mentioned this week include: XML_RPC-1.3.0RC1 (beta), PEAR-1.4.0a10 (alpha), Auth_HTTP-2.1.6RC1 (beta), and Net_Monitor-0.2.2 (beta).