MidCOM can now be PEAR packaged

This decision meant a bit of extra work for me as I had to rewrite the supporting utilities that handle component packaging. However, now that work is done, and I made my first PEAR-powered MidCOM installation today. The result was a working but a bit limited MidCOM environment, as can be seen from this AIS screenshot:

Nice points

PEAR packaging of MidCOM brings lots of benefits, including:

• Components can have other PEAR packages, components, or even PHP extensions as dependencies that PEAR installer will handle
• Users can install only the components that they actually need
• MgdSchema file installation in components is much easier than it used to be
• We can start shipping static files inside the component package and install using Role_Web

If mRFC 0021 passes voting, this will become the default way to distribute MidCOM and components.

Updated 2006-02-09: MidCOM PEAR channel

There is now a PEAR channel for MidCOM packages running in pear.midcom-project.org. To install MidCOM from there, simply run:

# pear channel-discover pear.midcom-project.org
# pear install midcom/Role_Mgdschema
# pear install midcom/midcom-2.5.1cvs

Read more in Henri's blog entry.