As mentioned in this new posting on Greg Beaver's blog today, PEAR 1.4.0 is nearing completion.

It's been a while since I said anything about development on the PEAR installer. I thought people might like to know a bit [unofficially] of what has been going on.

Since the last post, I realized that in order to implement mirroring of channel servers effectively, there would need to be an easy way to retrieve data without demanding a lot from the mirrors. [...] The other nagging problem has been how to specify that PEAR_Frontend_Web 0.4 and earlier won't work with PEAR 1.4.0, and that PEAR_Frontend_Gtk 0.3 won't work with PEAR 1.4.0.

The only features that I wish to see avialable prior to a beta release are a working phar-based installation option for PEAR (that's using PHP_Archive, for those who haven't been following my blog), and a working first draft of PEAR_PackageFile2Manager, a package for managing package.xml 2.0.

Sounds like things are really starting to shape up for PEAR for this upcoming release - and the PHP_Archive packaging can only help it spread faster.