On the PEAR blog today there's an update about the migration over to github that 5 million lines of code has already made:

Since October 2011, 5 million lines of the PEAR codebase has shifted to github. Hand in hand with this shift has been the tireless work of Daniel C - someone who brazenly said "I will fix the failing packages!" in the tail end of last year.

As a result of his efforts a list has been created of known good packages to use with PHP 5.4. Other results include:

• All test infrastructure upgrading to PHP 5.4 release candidates
• All database driven test suites executing properly, catching a variety of simple bugs
• Hitting a point of "near zero" patches to be applied to unmaintained packages
• Increasingly, the PEAR QA team is delivering PHP 5.3+ friendly forks of existing packages

On the PEAR Group blog there's a new post welcoming all new contributors to the project and pointing out that the PEAR account on Github has officially passed the 200 repository mark in the move from SVN to Git.

PEAR is about providing the PHP community with reusable, effective components - this has been our mission since day 1. If there is anything we can do to make that goal happen, to assist you as an individual or company, I would strongly encourage you to let us know - we're here to help.

They mention the work of two individuals that have done good work on a specific package, meldra and Gemorroj - perfect examples of how the move to Github has made it simpler to implement changes that have been "waiting in the wings" on the XML_Feed_Parser and Image_Barcode2 packages.

If you've had changes you've wanted to make to a PEAR package in the past but haven't ever gotten them submitted, there's not a better time than now.

PHPBuilder.com has a new tutorial posted about interfacing with GitHub in PHP, using their API to hook into and pull down information about users and repositories.

The Git-based project hosting service GitHub is certainly the belle of today's technology ball, having attracted more than 1 million registered users and amassed more than 2 million hosted projects in less than three years. [...] GitHub High Scores and GitHub Badges are two examples of third-party services created using the GitHub API, which is capable of carrying out any task you might wish to perform via GitHub.com. With it you can create, edit and search repositories, learn more about fellow GitHub users, and manage repository issues.

Jason shows how to use the php-github-api library to connect to the API, search repository information, get user details, finding their repositories and accessing restricted resources (things only available for the authenticated user like updating your account or working with your own repositories).

On the PEAR blog today it's been pointed out that many PEAR packages are moving to github as their standard place for development and repositories under the pear and pear2 accounts are available for anyone wanting to make the move.

While the existing PEAR packages will continue to use the pear.php.net distribution and bug tracking capabilities; it's never been easier to contribute to a PEAR package - simply fork; add your changes and send us a pull request. If your preferred packages aren't yet on github, please feel free to drop us a line on the pear-dev mailing list.

Here's more about the process to get the repository set up and how to migrate your package's current code from SVN over to github. The transition's pretty painless and can make the social development and improvement of your package a lot simpler.

Fabien Potencier has made an announcement on the Symfony Blog today about all the availability of previous Symfony versions on github.

symfony1 is well and alive and many developers are now using it for projects hosted on Git. But as the official symfony 1 repository is hosted on Subversion, it's not always easy to get things versioned easily. As of today, this becomes much more easier. If you are using Git and symfony1, you can now use the official symfony1 Git clone.

There are branches for each of the major 1.x releases as well as tags for some of the minor releases. You can, of course, still access the latest packages directly via the symfony website.

Ken Guest has a new post today talking about a PEAR package he's been developing, Services_Openstreetmap, to interact with the OpenStreetMap service to make it simpler to work with OSM data, adding new locations and working with users.

So over the last while, I've been working on a PHP package imaginatively named Services_Openstreetmap, for interacting with the openstreetmap API. I initially needed it so I could search for certain POIs and tabulate the results; it's now also capable of adding data to the openstreetmap database - nodes and other elements can be created, updated and so on. It will even access the details of the user that is being used to modify that data, which is one difference between it and the other single purpose OSM frameworks.

He's submitted it to PEAR for official inclusion. Until then, you can download the package from github. The OpenStreetMap project is a community-driven mapping tool that allows users to provide new map information or make updates in an effort to keep things more up to date.

As mentioned on the Web Species blog in this recent post, they've developed a "Windows Azure done right" platform (Azure++, name pending) that makes deploying to an Azure platform a much simpler process, pulling from something like a remote code repository (maybe github) and deploying in less than five seconds.

Azure is just impossible to use for PHP today. This is a fact. Doesn't matter which way you look at it, it just su.. isn't particularly good. The amount of steps you need to make, the knowledge you need to have and the fact that you can only deploy from Windows host are some of the things which make it a very painful experience. I had enough of this pain.

The service helps you make quick and easy Azure deployments. Features include multiple datacenter support, your choice of PHP versions (5.2 or 5.3) and the ability to deploy in "production" or "development" environments. You can find out more about the service here.

Lars Tesmer has an alternative to testing xceptions in PHPUnit that's a bit more flexible than just a docblock comment definition.

My main issues with this way of expecting exceptions are: The expectation is pretty far away from the location you'd normally expect to find an assertion. Usually, an assertion can be found at the bottom of each test function, whereas with the current method PHPUnit uses, it's at the top of the test-function. Additionally, it's an annotation "buried" in a comment which is easy to miss. Finally, PHPUnit will watch for an exception thrown by any of the code inside the test-function.

To replace it, he's created an "assertThrowsException" test that takes in the exception type to test for and the code to test for the exception (via a closure). He has his proof-of-concept posted on github if you'd like to give it a try. This also allows you to test for more than one exception in the same test, possibly as a result of slightly different conditions.

On CodeIgniter.com there's a new post updating the community on more of the current happenings surrounding the project including the status of their move to github and another source for developers to find the CI help they need.

In less than two weeks since the announcement was made at CICON that CodeIgniter was moving to GitHub, we've seen some incredible results from the change. Already CodeIgniter is the 10th most watched PHP project at GitHub (currently 758), with 42 open pull requests, 53 merged pull requests, 170 forks, and 41 individual contributors. Incredible!

[...] We also noticed what seemed to be a spike in activity on the #CodeIgniter Freenode IRC channel, so we've decided to make it more prominent to encourage its continued use. You'll now notice an IRC tab in the main navigation, letting you access the #CodeIgniter IRC channel right here at CodeIgniter.com.

If you want more details on why they made the switch over to git, check out this blog entry from the EllisLab site for an explanation from Derek Jones

The CodeIgniter blog has a a new update today with some changes that are happening in the project and it's community.

If you are following CICON 2011 today, then you no doubt already heard from the Reactor team: CodeIgniter is now using Git for source control, and has moved its home to GitHub. Also, CodeIgniter "Core" is not longer being publicly maintained. CodeIgniter "Reactor" is CodeIgniter, so we are dropping that suffix. In short: CodeIgniter is the framework, and Reactor is our community driven development program.

As a part of the move they also released a new version of the formerly-Reactor codebase. The EllisLab blog has more information about the git switch including their reasons and some of the immediate effects they see from the change.