Over on Greg Beaver's weblog today, there's a new posting concerning the serious progress on PEAR development that is currently going on.

Development of PEAR 1.4.0 is nearing a crucial point: where I stop doing junk and release the dumb thing. I just completed a few more crucial unit tests today, including real-world tests of installing and uninstalling things like the SOAP package.

There are a few issues with the installer that annoy me, such as the way the "pear download" command works, and so on, but I've managed to get a few of the surprising kinks worked out thanks to Davey Shafik's mucking around with CVS (and zapping his existing PEAR install in the process. We sorted that out rather quickly, thank God).

He goes on talking more specifics about what this new development involves and a few benchmark stats on how well it will help performance. Also, if you're looking to help out with some real-world testing on these new developments, head on over to http://www.php.net/anoncvs.php, log into the CVS anonymously and get the pear-core module.