With his own look at "the future of PHP and PEAR", Davey Shafik has posted this new item over on his weblog today.

It has been decided by those "higher" powers that PHP 6 will not feature PEAR bundled.

First off, I'd like to point out that the PHP 6 development branch was only created about a week ago, and we're not likely to see any sort of a release for at least a year (if PHP 5.1 and the scope of changes needed for Unicode are any indication) - how can this decision be made at this point?

He continues on talking some about the contributions that Greg Beaver has made to PEAR ("all but re-written PEAR from scratch") and a few comments towards some of the problems that several people complain about in looking at PEAR.

To summarize, I don't think the decision was taken lightly, but it was definately taken prematurely. Nothing this drastic which affects something which I consider integral to PHPs continued success should have been done till a) there had been some community discussion b) A solid plan is formed for a replacement. README.PEAR is not enough.