There are some interesting things happening over on the PEAR mailing list reciently - including talks about a new a new "clean slate" with PEAR2.

I think this quote sums it up nicely: While previous mistakes don't make a wrong a right, I think our whole (PEAR) manual lacks any consistent concept of what we really feel needs to happen when and where. [...] I think its time we fix our standards by starting from a clean slate with a PEAR2. There we can think about how to best deal with our developer and users base and how to great the best possible code in a PHP version which actually supports our needs for OOP.

The idea here would be to start the library over, moving over the pieces that currently conform to the spec (yes, there are some), and rebuilding the ones that were less than adherent. It could mean a long time before the new PEAR2 library would be out there for the public to use, but it would be that much better off for it...

Thanks to PHPEverywhere for the posting.