Thanks to the support of Hannes, the first couple of readme's are now reST'ed over on php.net. Actually this also includes a new readme which is essentially a port of the release process wiki page. Anyways to get things to work I had to modify my initial script a bit. After a chat with Hannes we figured out how the script should work. Essentially we have one script that does the rendering based on a list of files that is hardcoded, which results in some happy HTML'ed files. These then get served up by yet another script with all the nice navigation stuff, including user notes around them. Hannes took care of all of that. Simple enough. Anyone who wants to help out feel free to just port a readme to reST (note that our reST parser has some limitations atm, so better look at the current ported files for inspiration).

Avid readers of my blog know that I have been pondering how to best approach schema evolution. I ported the schema management from Metabase to PEAR::MDB2_Schema. I even gave a talk that admittedly only did a good job of defining the problem and solutions that all suffered from severe limitations. Now for the first time I am starting to feel somewhat good about an approach to migrations. I wrote a post to the Doctrine developers mailinglist detailing the key pieces that I want to add to Doctrine's migrations. The idea is to use the migrations approach made popular by Ruby on Rails but improve this concept with several key additions.

We have taken over an application which had "pretend" failover. Essentially it had two servers with automatic failover between the two. However they both relied on another server for providing the data storage via NFS all the way down to the MySQL server. Interesting how one can manage to provide no real failover with 3 servers. Obviously we want to fix this and actually a number of servers have already been bought. So now we have moved the MySQL server with a cold standby on separate machines. We also have 3 frontend servers which we want to load balance. We will probably use memcache to manage the sessions, as we are not so worried about a lost session when a crash occurs. But now comes the problem: There are a lot of places where administrators and end users can upload files, which end up in the file system. Now how do we replicate those files across all the nodes?

So I have decided I need a few more babies after putting my first OSS baby aka MDB2 to rest. Speaking of rest .. one of my new babies will be reSTed from the very beginning. The goal is to convert all of the various README type files in cvs.php.net into the reST format. This will enable us to render them to html and docbook while still keeping them plain text readable. For now I have used the Horde Text_reST package, which doesn't do everything one would hope for (I am having some issues with lists and there is also no docbook renderer). Hopefully the folks at eZ will come through with a fancy new parser/renderer one of these days. At least Derick said its on their agenda.

Je suis desolez que mon francais est tres mauvais. But I am very eager to change this. So some day the previous sentence will actually be somewhat grammatically correct. I am not really aiming for written perfection, but I want to be able to hold a decent casual conversation in French without forcing the other person to switch to German or English all the time. I decided this a few weeks ago. However now I have been accepted to speak in Montreal at the mostly French speaking PHP Quebec conference!