I use Phing to deploy my projects, and as they become more complex I expand on my use of Phing tasks. For instance, I have a ZIP archive of zip codes that Phing extracts and then imports into a database when deploying the application.

I maintain two development environments. One on a Linux server, and one locally on my Windows laptop using WAMP. So naturally, my PHP projects are cross-platform compatible and run on either Windows or Linux. And for the most part that simply means being careful about buildings paths, filenames, and file permissions.

To my surprise, the Unzip task defined in my build.xml that imports the Zip code data failed in mysterious ways: It reports success, but there's no extracted files to be found. It works on Linux, but not on Windows.

I dug into it and found two issues. First, the Phing's Unzip Task doesn't have the most solid error checking, and errors coming back from the Archive_Zip PEAR component. Second, the Archive_Zip PEAR component doesn't correctly check for absolute paths on Windows. Both problems have been reported on Phing's web site as Issue #261 and #262.