Following up his entry on the self-installing PEAR idea, Greg Beaver has a new post today with an update on his work with the PHP_Archive package.

After writing this entry I've spent some time hacking on Davey Shafik's PHP_Archive, and to my amazement, have managed to fix every major issue that I could think of!

The major issues Davey had not been able to fix were with gzipping to make compressed .phars. I took a look at Vincent Lascaux's excellent File_Archive package and realized that by adding only a few lines of code, I could completely fix the gz problem, and better yet, eliminate the runtime dependency on Archive_Tar. Replacing that huge file with only 40 lines of code also meant that PEAR.php went byebye - can we say significant speedup?

In the end, it's pretty goddam cool, and will make it possible to distribute PEAR's installer as a single file containing everything one needs - FINALLY!

Definitely a step in the right direction for PEAR...