PEAR design and maintainability

Earlier this month Stig mentioned something about a scheme for "letting companies define their own 'corners' of the package space". Here at Ethicon Endo-Surgery we came up with a simple way to do something like that. In our include path in php.ini we have two directories ees-lib and pear-lib in that order. The pear-lib directory contains the most recent PEAR files from CVS. The ees-lib directory contains an EES directory which contains all of our in house classes (an EES package to avoid name conflicts). Ees-lib also contains any changes or extensions that we have made to PEAR; for example if we made a change to DB_common or simply added a class to a package we would duplicate the directory structure under ees-lib for the DB package containing only the files that we changed or added. Since ees-lib is in the include path before pear-lib the changed and added files will be included or required instead. Keeping our files in ees-lib/EES/ also lets us easily update pear-lib without worrying about wiping out anything that we have done. I am not quit sure if this addresses the issue but others may find this helpful. Adam