Greg Beaver has this new post over on his blog today with what sounds like the start of something good - the next revolution in PHP installation.

Installation of PEAR has generally been quite difficult. Grabbing go-pear remotely requires downloading a whole bunch of packages, and it has often been necessary to hard-code in specific package versions directly in go-pear to work around bugs in core packages. In addition, maintaining the PEAR bundles distributed with PHP has been a royal pain in the rear end.

This is all about to change. In the past few days, I realized that with the advent of PHP_Archive-based .phar files, it is possible to distribute a self-contained .phar that contains all of the packages needed to install PEAR from scratch. I've blogged about this in the past. What I hadn't realized is that I could simply bundle in an uncompressed PEAR in the .phar itself and use it instead of all the complex download/install stuff in go-pear.

So, basically, Greg's idea is to provide a single .phar file that would simply replicate a PEAR distribution from one machine to another, resulting in a "less mess, less hassle" kind of PEAR install.

With something this easy to use to get PEAR up and working on a system, there would be one less excuse for developers out there to not use this great PHP resource...