Greg Beaver has this new posting over on his blog today about a new PEAR-related application that can ease the creation of a PEAR package.xml file for any of your packages - All behold PEAR_PackageFile2Manager!

I just finished work on the long-awaited first draft of PEAR_PackageFile2Manager. This package works in conjunction with PEAR 1.4.0 to generate package.xml version 2.0 from a simple script. Unlike PEAR_PackageFileManager, PEAR_PackageFile2Manager relies heavily on functionality built into PEAR's own PEAR_PackageFile_v2 and PEAR_PackageFile_v2_rw classes. This means the code is really quite simple, and does not need to do any nasty hacks in order to implement its functionality. Tremendous separation between content and manipulation of that content is maintained such that a drastic change of the underlying API would not require much change to PEAR_PackageFile2Manager. Yay!

New features include subpackage support, full backwards compatibility between the package.xml (from PEAR_PackageFileManager) to package2.xml, and full support of all present and future package.xml 2.0 features.