Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

I have to be up for work in six hours, and just haven’t had enough time to finish my PHP 5 status email for the gentoo-dev mailing list.

It’s useful to write status reports, as it gives you something in black and white to stare at and digest. For example, the PHP5 ebuilds don’t install the PEAR installer; we moved it out to the PEAR-PEAR package. But, when you look at it, the PEAR installer requires dev-php/php anyway, and it also requires dev-php/php to include libxml2 support, so I can see why a lot of PHP users don’t support our decision to move the PEAR installer out of the PHP5 ebuilds.

There’s a couple of reasons why. The first one is that the PEAR installer can be released independently of PHP releases. Having the PEAR installer as a separate package means we can get the latest fixes to users as quickly as possible. The second reason is that it’s against Gentoo policy for two or more packages to overwrite the same files. As policies go, it’s one of the ones that we devs can break and (so far) get away with, but I’m sure that, sooner or later, that’ll have to change. And we need to be ready for it.

Sebastian is working away atm, but when he gets back I hope to have a chat with him about how we want to handle the PEAR side of things - it’s much more his area than mine - and make sure the PHP 5 Status email covers what he wants. Until then, it’s best for me to hold back on the email.