What the board has decided about this committee or office, and the reports it filed, most recent first. Generated from the published minutes.
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Please note. The board approves the minutes of a meeting at the meeting after it, and they are published then - so the most recent meeting is not usually here. ASF Members can read the draft in the board's own repository until it is.
[raw] the published minutes, which are the record. [main index]
| Date | Action | Decided by |
|---|---|---|
| 2000-07-24 | Appointed Rasmus Lerdorf | the board, by resolution |
| Date | Decision | Item | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2004-02-18 | Resolution to separate PHP from the Apache Software Foundation | special order | approved |
| 2003-07-16 | Discussion: PHP licensing | special order | no outcome recorded |
| 2002-10-30 | Sam Ruby was asked about his discussions with the PHP Group. | unfinished business | discussed |
| 2002-10-16 | Sam Ruby was designated to take the action item for talking with Rasmus and the PHP project about… | unfinished business | discussed |
| 2000-07-24 | Establishment of an Apache PHP Committee | special order | approved |
| 2000-02-28 | Ken requested that the ASF investigate the procedure in having the ASF formally accept PHP and… | special order | no outcome recorded |
No report received.
PHP usage keeps growing both in absolute numbers and in terms of the percentage of servers with it installed. Graph: http://www.php.net/usage.php Roughly 31% of all domains have PHP installed and detectable by Netcraft. SecuritySpace reports 51% of all Apache servers have PHP enabled. The current version is 4.3.2 with 4.3.3 scheduled soon. PHP 5.0 is also approaching beta with the major change being more advanced OO capabilities. Due to MySQL AB changing the license of the mysqlclient library from LGPL to GPL for 4.x versions we will no longer bundle the library and have to be careful to write our MySQL extension such that it can be linked against the older non-GPL version of the client libraries. There will most likely be an exception for OSI-approved licensed projects that will alleviate this problem a bit, but we will still unbundle the library. This does put some pressure on us to use an OSI-approved license and as you know the new ASL is not OSI-approved (yet). There has also been discussion around whether we should make an effort to try to drink more of the ASF Koolaid or not. We still don't have a clear picture of what the impact on the project would be. We don't know if we have to go back and get CLA's from the 450 people who have contributed something to the project over the past 10 years and what the changes to our day to day way of doing things would be. Statements from Greg and others that include "for now" or "initially" really haven't helped this in any way. We understand that copyright needs to be assigned to the ASF and that the ASF then would put it under the new ASL license. We understand that we would need to separate our CVS into two repositories most likely. One that contains only ASF licensed code and one that has everything else. How much stuff we can leave in the "everything else" repository is still unclear. We bundle a number of things that PHP simply wouldn't work without including Zend and PCRE and less critically GD, sqlite, libxml and a few others. And we understand that there would be some oversight in some form of the ASF repository. We are looking for a statement from the board which does not contain the phrases "for now" nor "initially" and clearly lays out the board position for what will be required for the ASF to have proper oversight over the PHP project. Especially if there are things beyond the above issues such as specifying how many feathers our web site should have, how we should run our PMC, how we handle granting new CVS accounts and what sort of oversight would be required on the 6 dedicated servers that run the php.net infrastructure.
The PHP project is still going strong. Since the Sept02 report
approximately 1.5 million new PHP domains appeared which comprises just
under 30% of all the domains Netcraft queries every month. That is up
from 26% in Sept02. According to SecuritySpace.com PHP is enabled on
51.24% of all Apache servers.
There is also a healthy interest in contributing to the project. In
Sept02 we had 651 people with CVS accounts. Today we just passed 800.
Well over half of these work exclusively on the docmentation.
Since the Sept. report we have released version 4.3.0 and followed that up
with a small security fix in 4.3.1. We are currently have the first
release candidate of 4.3.2 out and the QA process is making slow and
steady progress on it. I expect to see 4.3.2 before the end of the month.
The big change with respect to Apache is that we dumped the rather
unstable apache2filter sapi module replacing it with an apache2handler one
mostly written by Ian Holsman and Justin Erenkrantz. We'll see if this
proves to be more useful. If you want to have a look at the current code
for this new handler, see:
http://cvs.php.net/cvs.php/php4/sapi/apache2handler
Another big push since the last report has been the pear/pecl sub-project.
Here we are trying to create a useful repository of PHP code and
applications easily installable via an apt-like command-line tool. Some
notables from that project is the apd profiler and the new apc2 opcode
cache. Having free open source profilers and opcode caches is important
to the project. More info can be found at pear.php.net.
The smarty sub-project is also rolling along gaining popularity. See
smarty.php.net for more info.
A lot of work is currently going into version 5.0 with most of the changes
being to the object model. Looking for a release sometime towards the end
of the year, perhaps sooner.
The number of PHP-specific conferences have been increasing steadily.
Here is the upcoming schedule of PHP-related conferences:
Mar 20-21 Montreal - PHP Quebec 2003
Mar 29 Budapest - First Hungarian PHP Conference
Apr 10-12 San Jose - MySQL Conf and Expo (not PHP, but large presence)
Apr 23-25 New York - PHPCon East 2003
May 8-9 Amsterdam - 2003 International PHP conference
Jul 10-13 Karlsruhe - Linuxtag 2003 (not PHP, but large PHP presence)
On the user group front we have a number of extremely active groups. A
shortened list of some of the more active ones:
South-Eastern Michigan User Group, Stuttgart, Chicago, Frankfurt, Twin
Cities, San Diego, Koeln/Bonn, Hannover, New York, Phoenix, Seattle,
Vancouver, Hamburg, Kansas City, Munich, Calgary, and Long Island.
All in all there are about 220 groups in 56 countries that we know about,
but it is hard to keep track of which ones are active.
A report was not received by the time of the meeting.
PHP
The [1]PHP project is alive and well. As with any large and popular
project there is plenty drama on a day-to-day basis, but in the end
we are building a useful tool used by a lot of people.
Roughly 9 million or 26% (up from 24% in May) of all public web
domains found by [2]Netcraft last month have PHP installed on them.
This of course includes many domains that may not use PHP, but it
doesn't include any non-Apache module PHP installations, of which
there are plenty.
According to [3]SecuritySpace.com about 38% (down from 45% in May)
of all Apache servers have the PHP module activated.
The PHP PMC, better known as the PHP Group consists of: Thies C.
Arntzen, Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, Andi Gutmans, Rasmus Lerdorf,
Sam Ruby, Sascha Schumann, Zeev Suraski, Jim Winstead, and Andrei
Zmievski.
Releases
The current stable released version is 4.2.3 with hopefully the
next release being 4.3 in the next 6-8 weeks and a PHP 5.0 sometime
in mid 2003. Since the previous report in May versions 4.2.2 and
4.2.3 were released on July 22 and September 6 respectively.
Sub-Projects
Within the PHP project there are a number of sub-projects.
* PHP
* PHP Documentation
* PHP Quality Assurance
* PEAR - PHP Extension and Application Repository
* Smarty - Templating system
* PHP-GTK
Committers
There are 651 People with CVS accounts on [4]cvs.php.net. Because
of the large number we do not give out real system accounts but
instead rely on pserver and CVS access control.
Rough CVS Access Breakdown
10 users have access to everything.
97 have access to all PHP source and Documentation.
372 people only have access to the Documentation.
90 people have access to PEAR and the PEAR Documentation.
35 people have access to the PHP website files.
3 people have access to PHP-GTK sub-project source+docs.
12 people have access to PHP-GTK sub-project docs.
2 people have access to the Smarty sub-project code+docs.
4 people have access to the Smarty sub-project docs.
Mailing Lists
PHP has quite a few mailing lists, both run by us at php.net and
many others elsewhere. These are available via both http and nntp
from news.php.net and we have found more and more people use these
alternative means to participate due to the ever-growing traffic.
The subscriber breakdown is:
php-announce 4832
php-general 1701
php-dev 622
phpdoc 248
php-qa 150
pear-general 513
pear-dev 303
smarty-general 440
smarty-dev 94
php-gtk-general 276
php-gtk-dev 97
Infrastructure
The main PHP web site gets hit pretty hard. 2-3 million hits per
day from between 70 and 80 thousand unique visitors. This
translates to somewhere between 6 to 8 Mbps sustained bandwidth
usage. We have had to move the main site lately and it is now on a
machine hosted and donated by RackShack. We are trying to entice
more people into using some of the 94 mirrors we have around the
world. The machines that make up the main php.net infrastructure
are:
* rs1.php.net hosted by RackShack (p3/1GHz, 1GB RAM 40GB HD, redhat
7.2) handles main www.php.net site
* va1.php.net hosted by VA Software (dual p3/650, 1 GB RAM, 130GB
HD, debian-stable) handles rsync.php.net and snaps.php.net
* rack1.php.net hosted by Rackspace (dual p3/650, 1GB RAM, 33GB HD,
redhat 7.3) handles mx duties, master.php.net, bugs.php.net,
gtk.php.net and smarty.php.net
* pair1.php.net hosted by Pair Networks (dual p3/1000 xeon, 512MB
RAM, 27GB HD, freebsd 4.6) handles mailing lists, cvs, nntp and
pear.php.net
* pair2.php.net hosted by Pair Networks (p3/566, 128MB RAM, 27GB HD,
freebsd 4.6) is a luke-warm-swap backup for pair1
Conferences
There are 2 major PHP events coming up. First, [5]PHPCON2002 in
Millbrae (Near San Jose) on Oct. 24,25 and then [6]The
International PHP Conference Nov. 3-6 in Frankfurt. PHP will also
have a small presence at Apachecon in Las Vegas in November.
Apache 2.0 Support/Issues (hasn't really changed from the May report)
Aaron Bannert and Justin Erenkrantz have worked hard in the past on
improving Apache 2.0 support. It sort of works in 4.2.x but should
be better in 4.3. We still have a huge problem with thread safety
issues in 3rd-party libraries. PHP itself is threadsafe and
re-entrant, but a number of 3rd party libraries that are commonly
linked into PHP are not and many more we simply don't know how well
they will work in a threaded environment. This will slow the
adoption of Apache 2.0 combined with PHP significantly. There is
also a certain lack of motivation when it comes to Apache 2.0
because the perception is that the improvements vs. headaches ratio
is not very good. If the perchild mpm ever became useful, you would
see a big push from the PHP community towards Apache 2, but right
now there is a bit of a ho-hum attitude.
Trademark Issues
Like the Apache project, we occasionally have some issues with
commercial entities using "PHP" in their name and other than asking
them nicely to not do that, we aren't sure how to handle it. For
some reason, hundreds of non-commercial projects use "PHP" in their
project name as well which we have been trying hard to discourage.
To that end we have tried to clarify this somewhat in the [7]PHP
license. Not sure what the status of the new project-agnostic
Apache license is, but we would likely move to that if it fits us
and addresses this point in a clear manner.
References
1. http://www.php.net/
2. http://www.netcraft.com/
3. http://www.securityspace.com/
4. http://cvs.php.net/
5. http://www.php-con.com/
6. http://www.php-conference.de/2002/index_en.php
7. http://www.php.net/license/3_0.txt