Pear Install Frontend

Hi there I was wondering if there is end user docs for Pear Frontend. I am trying to get a branched install of pear so we can avoid requesting our admin to install each package. We have access to setup a pear branch in our own classes path which is outside the web directory. What i need to know is how do we setup pear to pickup this directory instead of the default one, do we need to request the admin to play with the pear config settings , we will need to setup a default include path anyway. Can we override this in the .pearrc file ? Let me know.