In a new post to his blog Mike Willbanks shows you how to build and maintain a PEAR server with Phirum.
Pirum is a simple PEAR channel server manager that was built by Fabien Potencier. The Pirum project allows you to easily setup a PEAR channel and publish your own packages quickly. This quick blog post / article will get you going with it in no time.
He shows you how to install Phirum (ironicly from a PEAR channel) and how to create the XML to define the PEAR service. Running Phirum will generate a few other files based off the XML configuration and adding in a package is as simple as a "phirum add" call. He also mentions adding support for cloning packages with the help of his updated fork on github.