PEAR Blog

2008 Elections are now over, you can view the offical results on the PEAR website.

The new PEAR group is:

elections are now over and a new PEAR Group has been formed. Just like last year and always following the Constitution, the new members have been elected by a secret ballot of PEAR Developers. They have chosen:

• Joshua Eichorn
• Helgi Þormar Þorbjornsson
• Joe Stump
• Christian Weiske
• Chuck Burgess
• Travis Swicegood
• Brett Bieber

The new PEAR President is: David Coallier

The kickoff meeting for the new group is being held today.

As every year it is the time of the election for the PEAR Group and PEAR President for the year 2008 and 2009. If you haven’t casted your vote just yet, NOW is the perfect time to do it so go to the election page and place your vote.

This year’s election contains a great mix of fresh mindsets, experienced and long time PEAR users and members of last year’s PEAR Group.

Go, vote!

Those of you on linkedin.com should join the PEAR group, it is open to all.  Those of you on facebook.com should join the PEAR group, just search for “PEAR” and it will pop up.

These groups are primarily for fun, but also act as networking tools to get to know the people who are developing and using PEAR.  The official support channels for PEAR are still the mailing lists and bug tracker, and are listed at http://pear.php.net/support.php

The PEAR Project has lost a member of its community. Bertrand Gugger (toggg) passed away in the night from June 16th to 17th after suffering a heart attack.

Bertrand was involved in the maintenance of several important PEAR packages, including the Validate package family.

He leaves behind a wife and four children, who have our deepest sympathy. He will be missed.

The SPIP project, where Bertrand was involved as well, has compiled a list of his achievements as a tribute to him. It is available at
http://www.spip-contrib.net/Les-Projets-de-toggg.

Today, the latest incarnation of the PEAR Installer, version 1.6.0, was released at pear.php.net (http://pear.php.net/PEAR to download, pear upgrade PEAR to upgrade).

This release fixes a number of major regressions introduced in PEAR 1.5.2 that were not fixed in PEAR 1.5.3 or PEAR 1.5.4, and is recommended for immediate upgrade.

New features are mostly minor and include:

• minor improvements to the output of list-all, list, list-upgrades, search. Channel is displayed for many of these commands by default, and with an optional switch for the others
• implementation of code coverage reports using xdebug for .phpt-based tests with the pear run-tests command.  This is somewhat experimental, and bug reports are expected on this new feature, but problems found will be fixed in 1.6.1

The march to Pyrus, the next generation installer for PEAR, and the repository of packages designed for Pyrus (PEAR2) continues.  Maintenance on 1.x will continue to contain bug fixes and security fixes, but the pace of new features is going to slow considerably.

If you find any bugs, please report them at http://pear.php.net/bugs/report.php?package=PEAR

I hope this release will be a great upgrade for all of you!

Greg