PEAR 1.4 is dead - PEAR 2.0 to come
In an inofficial meeting the PEAR Group decided on the future of PEAR today. The main problem with PEAR is the BC topic and that therefore the migration of PEAR to PHP5 is pretty slow. To not be bound to their own rules, the PEAR community retired the release of PEAR 1.4 (which has been in alpha phase right now) in favor of starting a complete redesign for the PEAR installer which will be PEAR 2.0.
Beside being PHP5 only (and of course fully E_STRICT compatible), the new PEAR release will get a complete new repository structure and website. Shortly after the announcement to the community Greg Beaver stated, that he was already working on the new major version for PEAR and wants to have a first development release by April the 15th. Some of the amazing new features of PEAR 2.0 will be:
Complete retirement of PEAR_Error in favor of PHP5 exceptions.
A completely redesigned packaging system, supporting encrypted packages, binary packages and even non-PHP packages after the example of the Debian dpkg (apt-get) system and even compatible with it.
Automatic dependency resolving, even for binary applications packaged with dpkg.
Support for namespaces.
Single distribution packages (like Java's JAR files) which can be run without any further engagement.
Binary PHP packages to run without an installed PHP interpreter.
I'm pretty much looking forward to this new major version of PEAR, which will definitly fix some design errors, made while building the first PEAR installer. A pretty good decision.
You can find the PEAR Group announcement here.
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