With his own look (in a very extended post) at the new PEAR 1.4.0 (and 1.4.1), Tobias Schlitt shares some of the details about the new release, and an extensive listing of what's new in it.

On September 20th Greg Beaver (for a longer time now the main man behind the PEAR Installer) announced the stable release of the new PEAR Installer Version 1.4.0. Yesterday Gerg updated the release to an even more advanced version 1.4.1 which solves some minor bugs and adds some cool features for PECL developers.

I think now it's time to write some introductional words about the new feature release of our Installer, which will steer the project into a completly new direction, since it's now possible for everybody to set up his own PEAR channel server and to distribute his applications comfortably through the PEAR Installer.

He goes on to talk more about some of the high-level new features of the package before diving deep into the complete list of what has been updated in this latest version.