question about PEAR vs. Zzoss installer

Hi, Sandro mentioned a few enhancements to package.xml a while back. At the time, it was too early to begin discussing most of them. Now that things are rolling, I wonder if it is the right time to bring up one suggestion that would affect dependencies. If an optional parameter url could be provided, this would allow applications to depend on packages that are hosted on other sites transparently. In other words, a <dep> tag might look like: <dep rel="has" type="pkg" url="http://www.phpdoc.org/Converters">XML_DocBook_peardoc2</dep> for another pearweb server (substitute Horde for horde packages, another example) or <dep rel="has" ver="1.2" type="pkg" url="http://www.phpdorks.net/MyPackage-1.2.tgz">MyPackage</dep> This change would benefit applications more than the current PEAR structure, so maybe it is better to investigate adding an application.xml dtd like the zzoss installer. The main issue that I can see this change bringing up is it would allow PEAR packages to depend on external non-PEAR packages. I think it would be sufficient to add to the CS that this is not legal, and make it a human-enforced rule (i.e. releases that depend on external packages could be annulled by the pear group), or PEAR could relax the reins and allow this. Ultimately, my opinion is that allowing PEAR to have the option of depending on external packages would be a good thing, as it would encourage people to adopt the PEAR package manager for installing applications, and probably draw in a large number of new developers with interesting ideas, and move PEAR in a good direction, even if it caused a few problems initially. This would also bring PEAR a little closer to being PEAR and not PER, as Harry mentioned a short while ago ;) Greg