Elections for 2008-2009 PEAR president

Hello all, It's been a great year, and it is time for elections once again for PEAR Group and the PEAR President. I've had a great time running PEAR first as "el dictatore" for 2 years, and then 1 year as your elected president after crafting the constitution. I have decided for commitment reasons and for the health of PEAR as a vibrant, evolving community not to seek re-election as president. My string quartet's career has taken off in a big way, which is limiting my time in which to meet, as some of you may have noticed from recent PEAR Group minutes (I haven't been able to attend). I feel it is important that the president of PEAR be able to show up for these meetings as well as execute other duties in a timely manner. The good news is that I have been able to code fully, and will be devoting my time to perfecting phar, Pyrus, and PEAR2 as we move forward into the next phase of PEAR. I have created an election at http://pear.php.net/election/info.php?election=10&vote=1, if you would like to run for president, please reply to this message and I will add your name to the candidate list. Any PHP developer is eligible to run for PEAR president, regardless of your affiliation with PEAR. Only PEAR developers may vote for the president. Before going further, I would like to take a look back at the past year, and examine the state of PEAR as a community. From May 1, 2007-May 1, 2008, there were: * 1400 bugs opened * 282 of the new bugs were marked bogus * 1018 bugs were fixed (792 of these were bugs opened since May 1, 2007) This shows the responsiveness to bugs as about 56% of new bugs being closed. * 55 new packages/1 RFC were created in PEPr * 22 are currently in proposal phase * 1 is being voted on * 32 new packages were accepted * 1 RFC accepted PEAR currently has 481 packages, and 415 bugs and 18 documentation problems, averaging only .9 bugs/package PEAR averaged 1 new package proposal every 11 days, most in the Services category. Important changes to the culture of PEAR: - PEAR2 standards were ratified - Pyrus, the next generation of the PEAR installer is very close to alpha - coordination and relations with internals is at an all-time high, with no sniping about PEAR from any internals developers in a public manner for the first time since I joined PEAR in 2001. - svn.pear.php.net was created and has activity for PEAR2 packages and Pyrus - mirroring of installation REST and tarballs was piloted with us.pear.php.net and de.pear.php.net - QA tools for tracking documentation, bug count, and tests were created by Christian Weiske - The tone on the pear-dev mailing list has vastly improved in its civility. - bug triage day was created by Helgi to tackle bugs - Thanks to helgi primarily and a few other folks, the PEAR website has undergone a major facelift as well as an ongoing under-the-hood transformation that will make it far more lithe. PEAR of course continue to have challenges, here's a short list of some of the most important: - as interest rises in PEAR, the number of bug reports has risen, making fixing bugs difficult - finishing PEAR2/Pyrus is a priority. More on this at the bottom of the email - namespace standards in PEAR2 need to be explored and decided. - licensing issues continue to be a concern as they are for all open source projects. - the manual needs to be moved to the new DocBook 5 format, and made PhD-ready I hope that the completion of Pyrus in conjunction with PHP 5.3 will result in a great interest in PEAR and PEAR2, the next PEAR group and president will have to take on questions of promoting PEAR2/Pyrus as the code nears completion and raise awareness in the PHP community at large about the power of these tools. Pyrus has been progressing. I realized midway through development that a golden opportunity lay in waiting for Pyrus if pecl/phar were to become a part of the core of PHP itself. Since the new year I have been devoting my available resources almost full time to readying pecl/phar for this transition, and I'm happy to report that as of early next week, pecl/phar will become php-src/ext/phar as a part of PHP 5.3 development. The final decision on whether to enable phar by default is yet to be made, but there is a decent chance of this happening. How is this important to PEAR? The phar extension provides a seamless API for accessing and for creating tar, zip, and phar archives, and for converting between them. This will free up an enormous amount of code inside Pyrus and allow it to focus solely on higher level tasks like dependency resolution, downloading from remote sources, and advanced things we've all grown accustomed to, with a tremendous benefit in terms of memory usage and speed over the current PEAR installer. It will also completely eliminate the need to have PEAR installed in order to use it - pyrus.phar can simply be downloaded and used. So, I'm very excited to bring this good news to all of you, as it will translate into direct benefits for developers as well as end users. You will be able to count on all users having easy access to your source, much more than they do now. Again, it's been great being your president, and I am not going anywhere, just stepping aside for new blood to run things from the top. :) Thanks, Greg