Pyrus and SimpleChannelFrontend questions

Hello, I'm working features for the PEAR2 website. The site uses Pyrus and SimpleChannelFrontend (SCF) as the data source. I have a few of questions about Pyrus and SCF: 1. I can get package dependencies of a package using: $package->dependencies['required']->package The returned object is iterable. How come it isn't also countable? 2. Similarly, how come I can iterate a package to get releases but can not count the package to count the number of releases? 3. How can I get a list of maintainers for a package including full name and email address? 4. How can I get a list of the categories a package belongs to? 5. Is there any documentation? Even the class docs in the source code are missing. This code is going to be hard to maintain in the future since there are no explanations present in the code. Cheers, Mike