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.

Padraic Brady has a new post to his blog asking you, the reader, for your suggestions on how to architect a distribution system for the PEAR2/Pyrus components.

With the idea of PEAR2 and Pyrus, I had hoped to see a renewal - the advancement of a PEAR architecture for the 21st Century. Instead, and this is just my opinion, PEAR2/Pyrus were a relatively simple iteration on a very old theme. [...] If the PEAR ecosystem has a failing, it is one of staggered evolution. Over time it has picked up additional features tacked on top of a base model.

He breaks up his thoughts on the future of PEAR2/Pyrus distribution into a few different topics - the issues he sees surrounding packaging (like static packaging definitions), suggestions for a dynamic channel aggregation system and overall usage of the PEAR system.

The PEAR blog has posted some handy instructions for those out there that want to get PEAR and PEAR2 checkouts working from the new Subversion repository (recently moved from CVS).

Now that pear2 is in svn.php.net, it is possible to do commits with multiple packages using a feature of subversion called "sparse checkouts." [...] Here is the version I used to set up pear and pear2 in a way that will allow committing to both pear and pear2 packages in a single commit.

Rasmus Lerdorf has written about the same thing for the main PHP side of things. All the commands you'll need are there to get things set up and working more efficiently.

Greg Beaver has posted an update one some of the things he's been working on in the realm of his projects - Pyrus, PEAR2 and code coverage for phpt-based tests.

In any case, now that work on ext/phar has shifted primarily to maintenance mode, and namespaces are finally ancient history, I've shifted all of my coding energy to getting Pyrus, PEAR's next-generation installer, ready to ship.

Pyrus is the PEAR installer as rewritten for the next major PHP release (5.3) and uses a lot of the new features it offers (including full archive support, SQLite 3, combined configuration files and several new developer-centric additions). He also includes a sample bit of code that he worked up to run code coverage reports against the PEAR packages. He includes links to three different examples of the report's output.

A new entry has been posted to the PEAR blog with the latest minutes for the group's July 13th meeting.

Some highlights from the meeting include new/upcoming RFCs for package naming schemes, exception handling in PHP 5.3, and a vote on extending the current PEAR2 Policies. Heavy stuff, check it out!

You can check out the full notes here on the PEAR portion of the PHP.net wiki.

Joshua Eichorn has blogged about three new projects he's added to the PEAR2 repository:

• COnsole_CommandLine - a port of the PEAR1 console package
• Template_Dwoo - a Smarty-compatible template engine
• template_engine - a simple templating engine (and the example package for namespace usage)

Not really what I expected to be the first round of new code, but its nice to be setting up access for people. Oh and remember PEAR2 is targeted at php 5.3 but not everything is namespaced yet since not everyone wants to run snapshots of php for development.

You can find more of the packages on the PEAR2 svn repository.

Travis Swicegood has made a new release of the successor to the PEAR RunTest package for PEAR2 - the new PHPT.

Since this is usable and PEAR2 is still being worked out, I've decided to release this as a standalone package for the time being with the intent of bundling it with Pyrus or including it directly in PEAR2 when PEAR2 is realized.

This provides the majority of the functionality provided by PEAR's pear run-tests command via its own phpt command and it can even provide pear style output.

Examples of its use are included as well as the method to download this latest version (via a PEAR channel, of course) or through the package's web page. Issues found with the software can be posted to the project's Google code page.

Though there's no slides for his unconference PEAR2 talk, Joshua Eichorn has posted some of his planned features for the update to the popular PHP package repository:

I do have a list of new features planed(or already implemented) for the Pyrus installer.

The list includes:

• no installation necessary. It runs out of the box as a .phar. No go-pear.phar needed
• Pyrus is much more development/production-oriented, and will have a "deploy" command for managing deployment of development code to a production server
• out-of-the-box supported packaging formats include .tar, .tgz, .tbz, .zip, and .phar
• PHP 5.3+-based code means it fully utilizes cutting edge PHP features such as SPL iterators, XMLReader/XMLWriter, ZIP extension, phar extension (if enabled), exceptions
• full application support is available with the new www and cfg (configuration file) roles

Check out his post for more items on the list.

Greg Beaver talks about a big push that he's making towards PEAR2 by working hard on an integral piece of the puzzle - the Pyrus installer.

I'm churning out code to turn its installer, Pyrus, from vaporware into actual code. Along these lines, there has been significant progress. The code has been developed on PHP 5.2, but will most likely target PHP 5.3 with the introduction of namespaces. Pyrus completely revamps the way things are done.

Greg mentions some of the functionality the installer will use including XMLReader/XMLWriter, namespaces and bits of functionality from the Standard PHP Library (SPL). He's released what he's developed so far via a PEAR channel with no other dependencies.

On the PEAR blog today, they're asking for thoughts on some of the standards for the coming PEAR2 development environment:

Please read the following document and post your comments on the wiki using the discussion page. Comments are opened for a period of two weeks. It is very important that you comment as these standards will define PEAR2.

The standards can be found here and include everything from the base requirements and package approach down to specific package-related rules (for things like directory structure, class-to-file conventions and handling dependencies).