File_MARC makes it to stable 1.0.0 release (finally!)

Way back in 2006, I thought "It's a shame there is no PHP library for parsing MARC records!", and given that much of my most recent coding experience was in the PHP realm, I thought it would be a good way of contributing to the world of code4lib. Thus File_MARC was born in October 2006. At the time, I had aspirations of quickly iterating to a 1.0.0 stable release. Hah!

Seven years later, I have finally cut a 1.0.0 stable release of the File_MARC library for PHP. The major reason I had been hesitating was that I really wanted to cut over to the native SplDoublyLinkedList class instead of my own user-space linked list. In the end, I still had to add a small shim to enable nodes to be inserted anywhere in the linked list (SplDoublyLinkedList::add() was not added to PHP until 5.5.0, to which few users will have easy access for a while), but I'm much happier about the result.

The best thing about this release is that it means you no longer have to add -beta to your install command, which tripped many people up, I'm sure. That is, you can simply install it with:

pear install File_MARC

Thanks to Bill Dueber and Ross Singer for pestering me to go ahead and get this thing stable, and to Demian Katz and Mark Jordan for testing out the final code!