After a bit of discussion and goading from the PEAR community, we decided to package MidCOM for the package.xml 2.0 format and only support PEAR 1.4 or newer.

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

Trying it out

Since packaging is not 100% complete yet, you need an existing Midgard 1.7.x and MidCOM installation to try it out. Here are the steps to follow:

• Upgrade PEAR to 1.4

    # pear clear-cache
    # pear upgrade PEAR
  

• Download MidCOM PEAR packages from http://www.nehmer.net/~bergie/pear/

• Create a new empty MidCOM site using Midgard Site Wizard

• Log into the site as administrator and go to midcom-admin/settings

• Set Path to Filesystem MidCOM to point to midcom/lib your PEAR directory
  • In my case the path is /usr/share/php/midcom/lib
  • You can find the directory out by running pear config-get php_dir

• Install the packages you need. Probably at least these:

    # pear install Role_MgdSchema-1.0.0.tgz
    # pear install midcom-2.5.1cvs.tgz
    # pear install midcom_helper_datamanager-1.tgz
    # pear install de_linkm_taviewer-2.tgz
    # pear install midcom_admin_content-1.tgz
  

• Invalidate the MidCOM cache by calling http://www.example.net/midcom-cache-invalidate

• Enjoy! You should now have a working but limited MidCOM 2.5 installation

Note: You might have to create the database tables used by MidCOM core by importing the /usr/share/php/midcom/lib/midcom/config/mgdschema/sql/midcom_dbobjects_full.sql file

Caveats

PEAR packaging of MidCOM is still a bit unfinished. The main missing points are:

• Most components don’t have the necessary package.xml and status keys in their manifest files yet
• Actual database tables are not generated for installed MgdSchema XML files. This should be done by calling the midgard-schema utility
• Package installation and dependency handling is not yet as easy as it will be when we set up a PEAR channel
• Static files are not packaged yet pending their reorganization in CVS

These missing pieces should be resolves quickly after the mRFC 0021 gets approved.