Best practice for multiple pear installations?

Hi, what is a good/best practive to handle multiple PEAR installations? Currently on my system there's the system-wide installation from the debian package in /usr/share/php . Using go-pear I already created my own repository, /data/www/webroot/pear and by calling /data/www/webroot/pear/bin/pear it worked quite well. Now a few weeks alter, just calling /data/www/webroot/pear/bin/pear revealed that it was not using my new repository but reverted to the default system wide which I don't want. When I ran /data/www/webroot/pear/bin/pear config-show it showed me the system wide path in /usr/share/php but using strace I couldn't any file where it is getting this information from (maybe it's a default settings if no configuration can be found?). The only pear configuration file I found was /etc/pear/pear.conf , but using strace I could make sure that /data/www/webroot/pear/bin/pear was NOT seeing it (it tried to read ~/.pearrc and /usr/etc/pear.conf, both which don't exist on my system. I looked at the pear shell script and it is using the correct INCDIR and INCARG commands to point to /data/www/webroot/pear/share/pear but it seems this isn't sufficient. I am using PHP 4.3.10. The funny thing is, I've installed PHP5 in paralel under /opt/php5 and running the pear command from the finds its php5 pear installation, but then Ive seen that it also properly reads /opt/php5/etc/pear.conf which has the right paths set. Did I just had bad luck and somehow managed to remove my pear.conf file from my new pear installation? I mean I don't have any problem doing a new installation but for the future I would like to know how to spot such a problem. thanks for any pointers, - Markus