Greg Beaver has a new posting on his blog today about a real milestone in the "standalone PEAR installation" project he's been working on - a standalone PEAR with no dependencies thanks to PHP_Archive.

I've just committed an example app in .phar format to the tests/ directory of PHP_Archive. It is literally a functioning PEAR command, version 1.4.0. This will work out of the box on any system, and will use existing config files if any are found, but it is entirely self-contained code (does not require any existing PHP files on the OS).

My hope is that this can be used along with a simple bundling of .tgzs to install itself for new users of PEAR. It looks like it will be entirely possible!

I see this as a major step forward for the PHP (and more specifically, the PEAR) community. I think that the installation process has been one of the things that has kept people from using PEAR to its full potential. Make this kind of tools nice and easy to use and the growth could be astonishing...