PHPUnit is a huge project, with its own needs and goals. The
constraints in PEAR do not fit anymore for the PHPUnit developement.
It makes perfectly sense to move it out of pear and create a dedicated
project.
Inst that scary then, that some of the bigger more widely used packages may also feel the same as time progresses. I feel it is the responsibility of the PEAR group to set the roadmap to make these developers and users feel at ease, I.e. if you had it in the docs that in one year PEAR would have a mechanism for external deps then at least people would know, or to the contary that this will never happen.
The last bit of news on the PEAR site is for November 2005.
The Quality Assurance <
http://pear.php.net/qa/> page is nice and informative, but again hasn't been updated since March 2004.
It seems that there are no additional members to the PEAR group since the start.
But when I look at Horde is shouts at you that this is an active vibrant project.
I have done many open source projects -
http://www.phpsupporttickets.com/ is mine (though this has a commercial release now) and the main thing is to keep your users happy, without the users then there is no project. PEAR would be just a group of developers using there own packages, but not getting the invaluable bug fixing audience that is required, need to put the funk back in.
One person actually commented that is was down to money - not having enough money to do marketing. If PEAR had a donation page, then I am sure it would get some money in, the question is how to deal with that money, who gets responsibility, how it is spent etc, I would suggest it gets spent on maintaining the PEAR web site, and content.
I'm sure this has already been said, but we wouldn't know :) Anyway of my soapbox now, Im loving PEAR and what I have been able to achieve in a relatively small amount of time.