Good documentation is essential for users to fully understand any software. Several PEAR packages lack documentation or have docs which need improvement. Writing documentation provides more information about helping out on this front.
Translating documentation is another important task. Not only does new documentation need to be translated into the existing languages, additional languages are welcome. Also, existing translations need to be brought up to date because the English versions have been changed. Help on how to perform the translation process is in the Revision Tracking section of the manual.
Some of the PEAR developers have wishlists at Amazon or a similar service. If you appreciate the work of a certain developer, feel free to buy something for her from her wishlist. To find out if a developer has one of those wishlists, go to the account browser, look for the details of the developer and there you'll see if she has a wishlist. Buying something from people's wishlists may even speed up the time in which annoying bugs are fixed ;-).
If you have modified a package to expand its functionality or to fix a bug, you should contribute your changes back to the community (some licenses force you to do so, and it is generally considered immoral not to).
Before creating the patch, you must first obtain the latest sources of the package you wish to patch from CVS by running the commands (the package in this example is Foo_Bar):
cvs -d:pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository login password is phpfi cvs -d:pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository co pear/Foo_Bar |
After you have finished adding/changing the code, TEST it: We will not accept code that hasn't been carefully tested. When you are absolutely sure the new code doesn't introduce bugs, create a unified diff by running:
cd pear/Foo_Bar cvs diff -u >Foo_Bar.diff |
Next step is to submit the patch. Send a mail to pear-dev@lists.php.net and Cc the maintainer(s) of the package. The subject of the mail should be prefixed with '[Patch]' to make it clear you are submitting a patch. Also include a verbose explanation of what the patch does. Don't forget to attach the .diff file to the mail. The maintainers of the package are usually listed in the header of each source file. Apart from that their email adresses are available on the package information page on http://pear.php.net/.
Note: If you are using Outlook or Outlook Express, please change the file extension of the diff file to .txt, because Outlook's MIME-Type detection depends on the file extension and attachments with a MIME-Type not equal to text/plain will be rejected by our mailinglist software.
Note: If your patch does break backwards compatibility, the chances are fairly good that the maintainers won't be happy about it. Thus you should always try to fix a bug in a way that does not seriously change the public API. But if there is absolutely no way to keep backwards compatibility and/or if your patch contains a groundbraking improvement, even API changes are fine.
| PEAR Manual |
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Copyright
Copyright © 2001 - 2006 by the PEAR Documentation Group. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).
Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
Distribution of the work or derivative of the work in any standard (paper) book form is prohibited unless prior permission is obtained from the copyright holder.
The PEAR Documentation Group consists of all the people that have contributed documentation to the PEAR manual. Representatives are listed on the front page of this manual. In case you would like to contact the group, please write to pear-doc@lists.php.net.
Copyright for the XML_RPC documentation
The documentation of the XML_RPC package has originally been written by Edd Dumbill as an independent document on his homepage and is published as part of the PEAR Manual under the following license restrictions:
Copyright © 1999,2000,2001 by Edd Dumbill, Useful Information Company
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
Neither the name of the "XML-RPC for PHP" nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
The following is a list of people that are helping to maintain this documentation. If you would like to contact one of them, please write to pear-doc@lists.php.net.
Lorenzo Alberton
Gregory Beaver
Daniel Convissor
David Costa
Thomas V.V. Cox
Martin Jansen
Alan Knowles
Clay Loveless
Alexander Merz
Stefan Neufeind
Jon Parise
Tobias Schlitt
Stephan Schmidt
Mika Tuupola
Michael Wallner
(In alphabetic order.)
Explanations about submitting new packages can be found in the Developers' Guide.
If you think that you have found a bug in a PEAR package, please take care that you are using the latest version of the package and that your system does meet the packages' requirements.
If the bug still persists with the latest version of the package, don't hesitate to fill out a bug report. The easiest way is to click to link "Package Bugs" on the package information page for the package on the PEAR Homepage, which you think contains a bug. This will take you to a list of existing bugs of the package. Please double check if the bug hasn't already been reported! If you are unable to find it in the list, you can click on "Report a new bug" to fill out the bug form.
More information and tips on how to report bugs in a proper way can be found at http://bugs.php.net/how-to-report.php.
If you have already fixed a bug that you have found in a package, please read this.
This chapter describes the different ways in which one could contribute to PEAR.
PEAR is an open source project, which means that everyone can help improving it. Improving doesn't always mean writing code. It can also mean reporting bugs, giving feedback, submitting feature requests and even financial support.
| PEAR Manual |
|---|
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 - 2006 by the PEAR Documentation Group. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).
Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
Distribution of the work or derivative of the work in any standard (paper) book form is prohibited unless prior permission is obtained from the copyright holder.
The PEAR Documentation Group consists of all the people that have contributed documentation to the PEAR manual. Representatives are listed on the front page of this manual. In case you would like to contact the group, please write to pear-doc@lists.php.net.
Copyright for the XML_RPC documentation
The documentation of the XML_RPC package has originally been written by Edd Dumbill as an independent document on his homepage and is published as part of the PEAR Manual under the following license restrictions:
Copyright © 1999,2000,2001 by Edd Dumbill, Useful Information Company
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
Neither the name of the "XML-RPC for PHP" nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.