A few months have passed since the last Phing development update in October, so here’s an overview of some of the recent changes.
Releases
Phing 2.16.0 was released on December 22nd, 2016. Details of this release can be found in the change log.
Barring any significant issues (that trigger a patch release), this release will be the last in the 2.x series!
3.0
Aiming for a late Q1 / early Q2 release date, version 3.0 puts us in a position to start cleaning up / refactoring the code base. The most important changes right now are:
- PHP 5.6 or above is now required.
- Old / deprecated tasks and code (such as cvs, old phpdoc, simpletest, etc.) have been removed
- Old wrapper and PHP 5.2 compatibility code has been removed.
- Deferred property expansion, support for sections and arrays in property files.
- Imported targets are always available as
importname.targetname. - Setting
project.basedirto a value of.now corresponds to the directory Phing was started in.
The list of intended changes can be found on the 3.0 milestone page.
New site design
As all (open) tickets were migrated to GitHub issues last year, the usefulness of the existing Trac site was reduced and its age became more apparent. Time for a redesign! The site is now a single page, containing the most pertinent information and links to documentation and downloads.
Slack team invites
Phing has a Slack team (with a bridge to link to the existing #phing IRC channel on Freenode). Most of the core contributors are on there, you can get invited too!
PEAR channel deprecated
A number of well-known PHP OSS projects have deprecated or removed their PEAR channels in recent years. For Phing, the PEAR channel used to be important delivery system, but it’s usage has been declining and the setup is proving harder to maintain. For that reason, starting from version 3.0, Phing will no longer be installable through PEAR but only available using composer or as a .phar archive.
