Robert Peake has a new posting over on his blog today about a new site started by a developer over at Killersoft.com - PEARified.com.

Hot on the heels of the Pear 1.4 release, Clay has launched Pearified.com -- a Pear-compatible code repository. The site already has a Pear-installable Smarty distribution, and next in the crosshairs are big names like PHPMyAdmin and ADOdb.

The very existence of a supplemental repository raises some interesting issues. My first question was: why? A partial answer comes from the packages pearified.com intends to host. These are big name packages that, for a variety of reasons, have not been accepted into the main Pear repository.

He continues on talking about some of the advantages to this idea - things like a single command-line script to update a complex application, or an automated PEAR packaging process to distribute your application. Of course, other items come up when you talk about distibuting software (like quality control), but they seek to be a middle ground between "the free-for-all that is phpclasses.org or HotScripts, and the formality of PEAR."

Could PEAR and Pearified.com become a major distribution source for PHP applications?