incremental updates

Christian Weiske has a new post to his blog looking at a feature of PHP that's very useful yet doesn't seem to be widely used - phar archives.

His post introduces you to phar and includes the good and the bad about their use.

It is possible to pack an entire PHP web application up in one single file and run it without unpacking it.

This files usually have a .phar extension, which is an acronym for PHp ARchive, loosely based on jar (Java ARchive).

The PEAR installer has been distributed since ages as a single .phar file, thanks to the PHP_Archive package.

LinuxPlanet: "With the purchase of SUSE by Novell many feared that the brand would be subsumed into the corporate borg and contaminated with proprietary add-ons.

But openSUSE goes its own way, and the result is a sleek, reliable distribution with all the bells and whistles.

Paul Ferrill takes it for a spin and reports."