Ben Ramsey has shared an interesting issue he's come across when installing packages via Composer where it installed a different version than expected when he ran an install. The problem turned out to be from an unexpected place.

For applications I control that are not distributed to the public, I like to hard-lock my Composer dependencies to a specific version. [...] Sometimes a library has updates that haven’t yet been released, and I need to use these right away. Composer allows me to specify the specific commit I want to use for a library. In this way, I can hard-lock a dependency to a specific state, even when there is not yet a release for the changes I need. This has worked well until today, when I tried to do a fresh composer install. After installing, one library contained files and methods that I did not expect. It turns out Composer was grabbing the HEAD of dev-master instead of the specific commit I referenced.

After some investigation into his "composer.lock" file's contents, he found the issue: a problem with the way that BitBucket handles the distribution zip files Composer requests. In his example, the zip file was of the HEAD on the repository, not of the specific commit (GitHub doesn't have this problem). His solution was using the (slower) "--prefer-source" option to grab the correct commit contents...not an ideal solution but it does what he needs.

Elliot Haughin has posted some of his thoughts about the huge amount of changes the CodeIgniter framework project has been going through lately including moves to Bitbucket, the "Core" versus "Reactor" branches and how he sees it all as "rather messy".

It was just a few months ago that the CodeIgniter community began to explode with a torrent of frustration that CodeIgniter simply wasn’t progressing as a framework. There were also a few prominent developers considering abandoning the framework in favour of more active alternatives. [...] Before we go patting ourselves on the back, and heralding the reactor as a great success, there’s a much wider question we need to look at: 'Are people actually upgrading?'.

He notes that, based on his experiences, people don't seem to be upgrading to this latest release and that several people still see Reactor as a "beta" and not a viable upgrade alternative. He suggests three things he think could help - a good upgrade guide, a stop of support in libraries for non-Reactor codebases and encouragement to use mercurial more (cloning the repo).

The day has finally arrived for the CodeIgniter fans out there - EllisLab has officially released CodeIgniter 2.0.0 in two versions - the Core and Reactor branches.

Today EllisLab and the CodeIgniter Reactor Engineers are proud to announce the first official release of CodeIgniter 2.0.0, which is being released in two flavors.

The "Core" version will be the branch that EllisLab uses for their internal applications and will be a bit slower moving. The "Reactor" branch, however, is more community-powered and headed up by a set of Engineers that will guide the framework and work to make it its best. Also mentioned as new in the post are the upcoming ability for users to contribute directly to the user guide, the creation of a standardized Authentication library and a more object-like model setup. If you're interested in the Reactor branch and want to try it out or contribute, head over to the bitbucket account for the project.

On the EllisLabs site there's a recent post talking about some of the big changes that've happened to their development process surrounding CodeIgniter and its future version.

EllisLab today announces changes to our internal development processes, including dropping Subversion in favor of Mercurial and adopting Assembla as our agile software development management tool. Along with these changes, CodeIgniter 2.0 pre-release code is in development, and is now hosted at the Mercurial-focused social coding site BitBucket.

They also talk about their move to the Scrum method of software development and how this (and their change of version control system) can help the future of CodeIgniter (version 2.0) come even sonoer through contributed updates and bugfixes made much simpler through the features of BitBucket (similar to Github). If you'd like to contribute, you can follow the CodeIgniter project and get busy contributing back to this great framework.