Mailing Lists
The XML content of documentation files is updated from day to day, and on busy days from hour to hour. To follow the updates in the English tree and participate in general discussions related to the PHP documentation, it is highly recommended that you subscribe to the <phpdoc@lists.php.net> mailing list. You can subscribe by sending a blank mail to
phpdoc-subscribe@lists.php.net. Similarly you can unsubscribe by sending a blank mail to
phpdoc-unsubscribe@lists.php.net. There is a web interface for these tasks at
http://www.php.net/mailing-lists
There are also separate mailing lists for translation groups, where native language discussions may go on and where language specific CVS commits are posted to. These mailing lists are named in the form of
doc-LANGCODE where LANGCODE is the same language code used in the CVS module name. You can subscribe to / unsubscribe from these mailing lists the same way as above explained, substituting phpdoc in the email adreesses with your list name. A sample list name is
doc-zh for the Simplified Chineese list.
Currently these lists (including the main phpdoc list) receive messages from the following senders:
- Members of the list: discussion threads about anything related to the phpdoc team.
- The CVS server: diffs about every small modification in the corresponding module's XML files. This means that the phpdoc list receives the English file modification commits and other support file's modifications, while other lists only receive the language specific commits.
- Other senders: the posting to list is not restricted, so people not on the list can also post messages. This way we got reports and suggestions by plain mails on the list.
- The PHP bug tracking system: bug follow ups classified as “Documentation Problem” are posted to the phpdoc list.
- SPAM: this is not a common piece of mail, thanks to our SPAM protection system. :)
As there are many posters to the lists including some automatic postings (bugs, cvs commits) you should only subscribe to those lists in which you are interested in. We recommend that if you only work on the English version, you only subscribe to the phpdoc list. If you are also a member of a translation group, then you should subscribe to the translation's mailing list too, after subscribing to phpdoc. Reading the main mailing list's mails at least enables you to know what is going on in the English tree, what needs to be updated, and what is changed in the build system.
You should be able to handle the traffic of the mailing lists you are subscribed to, but just in case you need to go for a long summer break, and you need to unsubscribe, there are other methods to read the messages after you come back:
The commit messages coming from the CVS server, that are larger then 8kb, are put into attachements. You can always see the commit message and file list in the body, but the diff is in an attachement.
As the Windows HTMLHelp Edition of the manual is evolving in an incredible way, there is a separate mailing list for CHM related discussions and announcements. You can subscribe to this mailing list at
http://www.php.net/mailing-lists using the web interface.
There is also a mailing list named
php-notes. You can access it the same way as the phpdoc list (just substitute phpdoc with
php-notes). This list is the place where all the manual notes are posted. You may consider subscribing to this mailing list if you would like to help manage the notes. See the next section for more information on note editing guidelines.
http://news.php.net/group.php?group=php.doc.