Using the pear installer (or pyrus) as an application deployment tool

Hi all. Right now we're using svn to deploy a large application, but we are desperatly looking for a better way to deal with it. Since our application is split into seperate (about 40) components, which are all versioned, I thought of using the pear installer (or pyrus). Now, I'm a (really) long time pear-user and follower of this list, but never had the need of developing my own package.xml-based package. I user the pear installer on a regular basis, but I have some specific questions, which I hope can be answered here. 1. Since every deployment would need it's own pear-config-file / base directory - is the base directory relocatable yet? I know that I fought with this issue some time ago (several years, I guess). It was hard to relocate the pear base-dir, since several of the directories were written "hard-coded" (I know, wrong term) inside the base dir. How does pyrus handle this? 2. Our components are all completely capsuled, every component has a base dir where everything resides, PHP-files, stylesheets, javascript-files, and what's left. This encapsulating would have to be left intact, but how can I achieve this inside the package.xml-file? Can i specify the PHP-role for each file, even if it isn't a PHP-file? Or is there another mechanism/role for this, that I missed? 3. Can packages be marked as "upgradable-only"? Our application-upgrade-system can't handle downgrades (yet), so I'd like to have this restrication inside my pear-packages as well. That's all for now... guess new questions will emerge when I do my first tests ;-) Bye, Stephan