In his latest post on his blog today, Greg Beaver looks to alleviate some of the confusion surrounding PEAR 1.4.0 and PECL. He goes through four points that were mentioned in Wez's blog about the release.

There are several confusions voiced in Wez's post that need to be addressed:

1. is package.xml 2.0 required?
2. why are Greg and others pestering pecl devs to use package.xml 2.0?
3. is it really necessary to support package.xml 1.0 and 2.0?
4. do I need to use PEAR_PackageFileManager to generate a valid package.xml?

He answers each of them, usually explaining how the change/update/addition was either a misunderstanding or optional. Most of the changes were integrated so that previous versions (of PEAR) wouldn't break because of them, but they can be taken advantage of by the "latest and greatest" upgraders...