PEAR 1.4.0 report - Major progress: 97% unit-tested

Hello, I am in the process of testing PEAR_Installer/PEAR_Downloader's support of all the various options, including some obscure ones like --soft. Once this is finished, the only classes left to test are: PEAR_Command_Install finish PEAR_ChannelFile PEAR_REST/PEAR_Remote PEAR_Task_* makerpm/bundle commands PEAR_Builder I'm pretty confident that I can finish the tests by Jan. 1. All normal package.xml 1.0 stuff is fully tested EXCEPT for pecl package installation. Those who would like to help out with testing, please feel free to upgrade package-PEAR.xml, there will be very few changes to core functionality of PEAR between now and 1.4.0a1's release. The only untested features involve the new package.xml 2.0 features (bundle, ext releases) and some tasks that nobody uses yet. replacements is fully tested and working. Today, I committed tweaks to an exciting new feature that occurred to me yesterday. channel.xml has had support for mirrors, but this had not yet been implemented. As of today, mirroring is fully supported at the client level. This is controlled by the new preferred_mirror config variable. The server in this variable will be used as if it were the primary server. Soon, I will probably also implement a comma-delimited list of servers like some kind of server_path, but that is for the future. preferred_mirror can be used for more than just typical mirroring, it can be used to do the linking that Mika wanted (I think it was Mika). First, set up a channel server as channel.example.com then, set up channel.example.com/devel, channel.example.com/stable as mirrors. For production sites, set the preferred_mirror to channel.example.com/stable, and for development sites, set it to channel.example.com/devel. In this way, you can securely switch from one repository to another without the possibility of installing the wrong stuff, and it sidesteps the problem of channel name=channel server. It's actually equivalent to PEAR 1.3.x's ability to set master_server to a new value, but is much more structured, as the servers must be in the channel.xml as mirrors. I will definitely be using this feature for testing pearweb, as I can simply create a channel.xml here on my computer that has localhost as a mirror, and then simply set the preferred_mirror to localhost when testing new features. Switching back and forth is easy as pie. I'll be using this to fully implement REST-based remote information for 1.4.0a1 or a2. Greg