After 14 months and nearly 200 commits, Marcus Borger and I have finished the first release of the phar extension in PECL. Phar provides both a stream wrapper (phar://) and a Phar class which can be used to access the contents of a phar archive. What is a phar archive? Think of it as a virtual filesystem that is customized for use with PHP, sort of like a Java .jar archive. Incidentally, the phar extension is a C implementation of the principles behind the PHP_Archive PEAR package.

A beginners guide to installation and usage is included, showing how to configure your installation and create two simple packages - one with a simple "Hello world" PHP script inside and the other grabbing the entire contents of a directory (and subdirectories) and pushing them in.

I just pushed out a release of PHP_Archive 0.9.1. This release fixes a bug that affects 64-bit users of PHP 5.2 and newer. Basically, the unpack() function does not behave in a predictable way when unpacking large integers. This is a known bug, and is documented at the manual page, although I was unaware of the issue until today.

He gives the example code that would cause the problem and a more correct version that would allow the package to work with all versions of PHP (previously, it would fail due to a bad return from pack). The latest version of the package can be grabbed from it PEAR page or via the "pear" command to grab it automatically.