On his blog today, Greg Beaver has a post that talks about the re-distribution of PEAR/PHP outside of the PHP.net site, and some of the problems that have resulted from that.

There have been a number of reports recently of problems with the installroot option of PEAR. First, it was reported that a PEAR installation done at an installroot didn't actually work at all. [...] However, there have been a number of reports of people using the installroot option on unix to package up PEAR in distributions of PHP, such as the ever-popular RPM format.

Unfortunately, this relies upon the afore-mentioned bug in PEAR 1.3.6 and earlier, and so scripts that have been working for ages suddenly stop working. This is not a good thing.

He gives examples of how to get things working correctly with both 5.1 and newer and for older versions of PHP as well.

Oh, and the "open question" he asks? "Does anyone actually USE installroot in order to install PHP or PEAR into a directory that they intend to use it from?" Leave comments here...