The new Package Development Standards initiative is proud to present its first publication, pds/skeleton (and the related research) for public review. If you are a package author, you are invited to post your comments and criticisms of the publication as issues on the relevant Github repository.

The pds/skeleton publication describes a set of standard top-level PHP package directories and files. If you are an author of more than three packages on Packagist, chances are you already follow the standard! That's because PDS initiative researches the PHP package ecosystem to recognize commonly adopted development practices. (See this list of over than 47,000 packages; if your package is there, it has been tentatively noted as already compliant.)

The public review period will last at least 2 weeks, perhaps longer. If there are no substantial errors revealed during that time, the standard will advance to "beta" status for adoption, and then to "stable" if no further errors are discovered in use.

Meanwhile, if you review the publication and determine that your package follows it, you should add pds/skeleton to your Composer "require-dev" block, because that will help the initiative track formal adoption rates.

Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.

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