Greg Beaver's latest post today talks about PEAR's feature freeze on version 1.4.0.

As of today, PEAR 1.4.0 (HEAD of CVS) has feature-frozen. This means all development leading up to and after PEAR 1.4.0 will only contain bugfixes. Also, development of go-pear.phar has reached a great moment: it actually works. In addition, instead of being located at pear.chiaraquartet.net, you can grab the latest version from CVS of cvs.php.net/pear-core/go-pear.phar via anonymous checkout (use google to find instructions if you're new to cvs.php.net).

He notes also that the remote install feature is split off and still pending approval, but that PEAR 1.4.0b1 might be coming any day now!