Greg Beaver has posted this new item today about some improvements/updates he's made to the PEAR_Task_Chiara_Managedb and <a href-"http://pear.chiaraquartet.net/index.php?package=PEAR_Installer_Role_Chiaramdb2schema&release=0.1.0&downloads">PEAR_Installer_Role_Chiaramdb2schema packages to automatically setup (or upgrade) the database structure of applications.

The end-user is responsible for setting the DSN that should be used to access the database via the post-installation script (installation will simply fail with an error message if this has not occurred).

The rest of the work is performed by the excellent MDB2_Schema package, which has the ability to examine two schema files, generate a diff, and literally upgrade the database structure. Because of this strength, it is no longer necessary to provide special sql files differentiating each release (although this is not a bad idea for those who like to do manual configuration).

He does include a reminder that this is all a proof of concept release, so stay away from it for production purposes - but feel free to grab it and poke around if you'd like to test it out...