Publish a new release on PEAR and github?

[TysonAndre]

https://github.com/php/phd/releases mentions the last release was 1.1.11, from 2019. Various improvements were made on the master branch since then (e.g. fixing various notices uses of deprecated features such as join() argument order).

https://wiki.php.net/doc/phd/install mentions that "The preferred method is using the pear channel", which also causes 1.1.11 to be installed.

I'm not familiar with publishing of pear modules myself, or who would be considered an owner of this application. Going through the steps in https://github.com/php/phd/blob/master/HOWTO.RELEASE first would help (e.g. checking for missing files and putting release notes in package.xml)

[TysonAndre]

@cmb69 - any idea? Would it make sense to mention the git/github repo in the wiki, which currently says "git.php.net is not recommended"

[cmb69]

Totally unsure about a new release, since several changes were made mostly with PHP documentation in mind, and these might break compat with other formats/packages. Not even sure if the (small) test suite still passes, and was it supposed to even work (e.g. PDF output has been marked as broken years ago).

I also have no idea who is using PhD besides php.net and the MySQL people.

[garak]

I would also point out that no releases are published on packagist

[philip]

I'm not involved enough to know the current scene nor volunteer to maintain releases, but pear install doc.php.net/phd installs v1.1.11 from Nov 2018 so that's a problem, isn't it? Seems today the only real option is to use phd from git; and the git instructions should probably provide non-pear setup information. I can't speak to packagist or what that'd involve but it appears there was an attempt with "tag 1.1.11 for packagist".

For what it's worth, the MySQL team (well, me) is unable to use the current version of phd but I may attempt to dig deeper in the future as time permits. We convert XML to XML using a custom package so perhaps our needs are unique. The issue seemingly relates to methodsynopsis changes in the past year. Not suggesting this should or shouldn't prevent a release, just figured it's worth mentioning as MySQL was referenced above.

[cmb69]

For what it's worth, PhD has been removed from Packagist (see #39).

As it is now, I'd still feel uncomfortable to make a new release; given the lack of maintainance, and its main purpose being to render the php.net documentation, it might just not reasonable to pretend some general usefulness and backwards compatibility for other users; they might be better off to fork from a suitable revision, and maybe backport some later commits. Those who want to render the PHP manual are probably best served by using HEAD.

[TysonAndre]

As it is now, I'd still feel uncomfortable to make a new release; given the lack of maintainance, and its main purpose being to render the php.net documentation, it might just not reasonable to pretend some general usefulness and backwards compatibility for other users; they might be better off to fork from a suitable revision, and maybe backport some later commits.

Would it make sense to do any of the following:

• fork it to php.net/php-site-phd so there's an obvious recommended fork when users eventually use php 9.0, and a larger number of maintainers to review bug fixes

  (my personal preference is to push the fork manually and note the upstream/fork in the READMEs, since github search excludes forks of repos entirely, and the functionality will be different)

• Tag the fork as a new major version (to avoid confusion for external phd users such as mysql)

• Warn in the fork about using it for repos other than php.net, and note that this may break in the future (e.g. check for expected files found in php.net doc-base)

• publish in packagist as something distinctly named from phd (e.g. php-site-phd) for easier global setup

  (Caveat: This would need to be done from a different repo: composer picks up new tags of existing/renamed repos even if the name changes - e.g. an unrelated example is that https://packagist.org/packages/etsy/phan/php-stats#all still exists for https://packagist.org/packages/phan/phan/php-stats#all)

• Update scripts to recommend git cloning this repo and using master instead of a stable release

(subset of results)
doc-base/scripts/build-chms.php
76:             execute_task('Updating PhD', PATH_PEAR, 'upgrade --alldeps doc.php.net/phd', 'pear');

doc-base/scripts/build-chms-config.php
28:      * PhD Beta             - If enabled, then PhD is treated as an svn checkout rather than a pear package

doc-base/scripts/create-phpdoc-setup.php
20:     - Allow installing PhD without PEAR? From SVN?