Re: [RFC] [Discussion] Deprecate PEAR and recommend Composer

On 10/10/2025 09:25, James Titcumb wrote:

The short version of that discussion is that PEAR is maintained by someone else; the PEAR group apparently is separate from the PHP group, as I understand it.

The PEAR website has a list of members of the PEAR Group, but says that they were elected for a one-year term in 2009: https://pear.php.net/group/ I'm not sure whether elections were abandoned after that, or if the page was just not updated. The "News" page ends in 2007, but links to a now-defunct WordPress blog, which seems to have been maintained until 2018, after which I can't find any official announcements at all: https://web.archive.org/web/20181102164127/https://blog.pear.php.net/ The "pear-dev" list has had 3 threads this year, only 1 of which actually got a helpful response: https://news-web.php.net/group.php?group=php.pear.dev The "pear-general" list has had only 1 message this year, which went unanswered: https://news-web.php.net/group.php?group=php.pear.general The RSS activity feeds are mostly broken, but comparing archived package lists, I think the most recently approved package was Date_Holidays_Peru in 2019; and before that, File_Therion in 2016. I also had a look through the list of around 80 third-party channels here: https://pear.php.net/channels/ Other than pear.php.net and pecl.php.net, I could find only 8 that looked like they might still be usable. - https://empir.sourceforge.net/pear/ - https://pear.horde.org/ - https://pear.michelf.com/ - https://openpear.org/ - https://phpseclib.sourceforge.net/pear.htm - https://pear.phpundercontrol.org/ - http://pear.timj.co.uk/ - https://github.com/Smarre/antlrphpruntime The remainder are either non-existent/squatted domains, or projects whose installation instructions refer only to Composer, or occasionally PHAR downloads. There are still references to "PEAR2" and "Pyrus" here and there, but https://pear2.php.net doesn't even resolve Everything points to the entire project being essentially unmaintained: there are people here and there keeping the lights on, but little else. Since it was for a long time promoted as the official package manager for PHP, I think the PHP project has some responsibility - imagine, for instance, if there was a security breach of pear.php.net. I think as well as removing references in the manual and php-src, we should at minimum work to add disclaimers to the site that it is no longer officially endorsed by PHP, and perhaps pointing to a migration guide to Composer. -- Rowan Tommins [IMSoP]