Some days are better than other to take good decisions. Today is one of them. After many years, it is time for me to spend some time on other projects and activities than PEAR. That’s why I send this mail to the list:

A small mail to tell you that I leave pear now. I do not have much else to say without going in personal things, so let stop here

All packages I maintained or co maintain has got other leads in the past weeks or monhts or we have been many already. I already set me as inactive everywhere. There is a couple Validate Locale without maintainers, but it should not be that hard to find someone else.

Why today and not next month or before does not really matter, no?

But stay tuned, things are moving fast here, more new things are coming!

NB: PECL has nothing to do with PEAR, so no I do not leave PECL, I’ll be even more active there

Zip is stable since two releases. I lacked the time to report it Three bugs were important:

• zipArchive::addFile was not updated and still used VCWD_REALPATH, it now uses expand_filename, all other methods have been fixed in 1.7.2
• freshly created archive has no comment or cdir, it segfaulted when you try to dump the archive object
• properties in extended class cannot be set (see the example code below)

<br />
<?php<br />
class myZip extends ZipArchive {
    public $testp = 1;</p>
 
    function __construct() {
       /* Do smtg */
    }
}
 
	<p>$z = new myZip;<br />
$z->testp = &#8220;sometext&#8221;;<br />
?><br />
 

Once PHP 5.2.0 is out, I will focus on the new features. Write stream support, unicode (php6+ support), pattern based addition/extraction and crypting functions.

As the sidenote, even if downloads stat are not really reliable, zip is now the fourth most downloaded extension

• Zip Homepage
• Changelog

The following final five received the most public nominations during the course of the six weeks and are listed in alphabetical order:

• Drupal
• e107
• Joomla!
• Plone
• Xoops

These initiatives are always more than welcome, not only for the money but for the visibility. Many OS projects are not supported by any commercial companies (nor their developers). It is hard for them to get a good visibility or audience outside a community which already knowns them anyway. Or even more important these days (sadly, I have to say), do some marketings activies or actions.

While trying to get the cairo (and pimp) PHP binding ready to be released, I finally sit down and port Wez build cscript to cairo. It still needs some cleanup, a nice summary message but it works already. I tested it with Visual C++ Express Edition but it should work with other versions as well.

My next goal is to add the tests (nmake tests) and fix the nmake install.

To use it, you need to create a directory structure similar to:

c:\ cairo

`-- cairo-1.2.4    `-- windows    `-- cairo.def    `-- buildconf.bat    `-- conf.bat `-- cairo_build    `-- include    `-- lib

Where “cairo-1.2.4” what the release archives, extract a recent release and add the missing directory and files:

• windows directory, it contains all development files required to compile cairo with png, ps, pdf, freetype2 and win32 support
• buildconf.bat, generates the configure.js script
• conf.bat, convenient batch to call the configure script, modify it to fit your wishes

Run “buildconf.bat” only once or if you changed the scripts, it is the equivalent of buildconf/autogen on Unix.

Call configure using cscript:

 C:\cairobuild\cairo-1.2.4>cscript /nologo configure.js --help ..Display the configure help..

Or use the conf.bat batch file.

You can fetch a complete Cairo 1.2.4 package here. The cairo_build contents is available here.

By default, the configure script tries to enable everything (w32, pdf or ps surface, ft2 support). You can disable each backend or option using —disable-backendname options (—disable-pdf to disable the PDF surface).

If you like to define additional paths for the libraries or includes, use the with-extra-includes and with-extra-libs. These options accept absolute path and will automatically add them. To change the location of the default “cairo_build” directory, use the with-cairo-build option.

Here is a nice screenshot

These scripts are the very first versions, they seem to work well for me. But don’t run away if you have many errors or if they don’t work at all. Leave me a comment or mail me.

I’m not sure if they should be available from the cairo site right now, they still require some tweaks. However, if some of you like to have them or to contribute/help/take the hand, let me know, I can put them in some public cvs/svn. Comments, contributions welcome

UPDATE 11/09

I fixed a possible issue with PDF and PS support, it should work way better now. The cairo_build_windows archive has been updated and a decent freetype2 is now included (from gnuwin32). The build system has been tested with VC++ Express and VC.net 2003. Also a configure.bat is now included, it is a simple “alias” for “cscript /nologo configure.js “. You can call it just like any real configure.

An VC7+ example project is available here. it uses the windows clock (from Writser Cleveringa) and store it as a PNG. It does not have any animation or fancy windows, I was too lazy to make it work. However this sample project gives all required details to use your fresh compiled cairo on windows. The second part is about using the PDF backend. The basket demo snippet is used.

Update 13/09

All backends work now, a dedicated page has been created and will be kept uptodate with the cairo git repository: cairo-win32. Results:

• test.png
• pdf-features.pdf

Downloads:

• Development libs and includes, cairo_build_windows.zip
• Cairo-1.2.4 ready to use package, cairo-1.2.4-win32.zip
• Example project cairo_example_windows.zip

I just release the long awaited Filter 0.10.0. This release includes many improvements and bug fixes (and is already documented!).

This release will be included in the upcoming PHP 5.2.0RC3, which is likely to be the last RC. Please report any trouble you find, and post your feedback (here, on the pecl-dev mailing list or in the issue tracker), it will help provide the best possible extension in the 5.2.0 release. A stable filter release should still hit the road this year.

The main feature additions of this release include the following:

• Add input_get_args method, Gets multiple variables from outside PHP (or a given array data) and optionally filters them
• Added support for php pcre expressions
• Added FILTER_FLAG_SCALAR and FILTER_FLAG_ARRAY
• Added JIT support
• Added support for custom decimal separators

Some behaviors changed since the last release, these changes have been requested by the current users:

• A value will be FALSE if the filter fails, or NULL if the variable is not set
• The integer and float parser has been improved, it may affect some invalid results (if you implement a work around)
• Empty strings are no longer considered as valid float or integer, earlier version returned zero when an empty string was given
• The default filter is now “raw” (unsafe_raw), it does not apply any filter to the default data, it works transparently in your existing applications.

To see a complete changelog, please consult the release page.

I like to thanks Tony and Ilia for their work in this release as well as all the users who reported bugs and kept asking for improvements!

• PECL homepage
• The manual
• Changelog
• Downloads