Local PEAR install confusion

about 3 months ago I set up a local install of pear on my web host account (a cpanel system). A couple days ago, my hosting company upgraded us to php 4.4.2-dev. I started seeing a lot of warnings coming out my PEAR includes: "Notice: Only variable references should be returned by reference in /home/headbonk/pear/lib/DB.php on line 1132" and other similar ones. So I figured maybe PEAR needs an upgrade to go with the php upgrade. I did pear upgrade-all and that seemed to fix some of the warnings - not sure I didn't keep track of exactly which modules were giving warnings. I also go a couple messages from the pear installer that I didn't understand: Failed to download pear/Archive_Tar (recommended version 1.3.1), latest release is version 1.3.2, stability "stable", use "channel://pear.php.net/Archive_Tar-1.3.2" to install /tmp/glibctestqGYBFW:1:22: features.h: No such file or directory pear/PEAR dependency package "pear/Archive_Tar" installed version 1.3.2 is not the recommended version 1.3.1, but may be compatible, use --force to install I started poking around, and found that pear -V reports my PHP version # as 4.3.10. phpinfo() in my document root reports the php version as 4.4.2-dev. My gut is just to redo the local install from scratch, but I don't know if there's something I need to worry about going on. I could just set a higher error reporting level in my .htaccess file. Any suggestions? Enlightenment? PS. my prefered package state is beta