Greg Beaver has a new posting on <a href=http://greg.chiaraquartet.net/">his weblog today concerning a question that has occurred to him about PEAR, PHP dependencies, and how they're used - PHP Dependencies: to bundle or to PEAR, that is the question.

Recently, I've been approached by several developers from both inside and outside the PEAR grove inquiring about the new channels feature of PEAR 1.4.0 that has been the focus of intense work on my part. They have raised several questions that are not easily answered by the current PEAR 1.3.x version. Most involve what to do in edge cases when you have an unmaintained package with critical bugs, or some other unreliable factor.

This has led me to think further about what we are dealing with when we use code written and maintained by someone else. How exactly does one depend on other's code in a reliable, safe way?

He describes both sides of the argument (the PEAR Way and the Bundler's Way), and gives a few advantages and disadvantages for each. His opinion on which way is best? The PEAR Way - "(in my opinion) the disadvantages of bundling far outweigh the disadvantages of the PEAR way". He backs it up with a few examples where bundling just wouldn't make sense, and reinforces the fact that PEAR "provides a level of security surrounding dependencies that developers simply have not been able to enjoy before".