Via a new post over on DynamicWebPages.de today, there's a pointer to the new release candidate for PEAR - PEAR 1.4RC2.

Today, right on the heels of the release of RC1 yesterday, the second release candidate for PEAR 1.4 has been posted. The validation error with the package dependancies and encoding problems have been fixed.

This new release candidate represents a great step forward for PEAR, bringing the community closer to the final release of PEAR 1.4 and the new features added from 1.3 - channel support, package dependancy lookups (before download), more flexibility in the package.xml file, and much, much more. Stability has also been increased substantially through the heavy introduction of unit testing in all parts of the code.

So, get on over and download this latest release candidate and get testing - the sooner the bugs are found, the sooner this huge upgrade for PEAR is released!