Greg Beaver has this announcement over on his blog today concerning a "PEAR now fits in a bottle: meet go-pear.phar".

The beginning of a new era in PEAR has arrived. I have just uploaded the first ever self-contained single file installation of PEAR, based on PHP_Archive. Unlike the pre-existing http://go-pear.org, go-pear.phar (a 768k draft is available at http://pear.chiaraquartet.net/go-pear.phar) provides a simple method for those with limited internet access or finicky firewall/proxy issues to download and install PEAR with tremendous ease. In addition, earlier problems with versioning have been eliminated as all packages are bundled directly inside go-pear.phar itself.

The go-pear.phar package allows anyone and everyone to simply and easily install the base PEAR distribution. This phar package, based on the PHP_Archive package, is as simple to install as issuing the command: "php go-pear.phar". The rest is up to PHP.

This is a wonderful huge step forward in the usage of PEAR - without a lot of the issues that others have seen with installation of PEAR and getting it to work with their environment, I forsee a bright (and busy) future for the "little PHP library that could"...