Tobias Schlitt's weblog has a new posting today with an update about the state of the upcoming PEAR 1.4 release that is "on the horizion".

Especially Greg Beaver and of course many others have done a great job and the implementation of PEAR 1.4 will possibly reach a new milestone by the end of this week 1. Of course this version of the PEAR core brings a huge lot of new features: The installer now supports channels, real post install scripts (greater customization of the system after the script has been loaded), the automatic resolution of package dependencies (get all of the used packages or just the required ones quickly and easily), The package.xml file (which has been shown a bit crappy with time moving on) has been nicely refactored, allowing comfortable usage of the new installer features, the installation of PECL binary packages, and A whole bunch of new installer commands.

Sounds like, with some of these advances, PEAR might just be seeing more and more more use as time goes on. I know a lot of developers tend to shun the PEAR libraries given that it's still a bit of a work-in-progress, but I think with some of the neat features mentioned here, we can definitely look forward to some tighter PEAR integration with popular scripts in the future...