As mentioned over on the Zend Developer Zone, the IBM developerWorks website has posted a a new tutorial with a hand-holding guide to the creation of your own PEAR channels.

This tutorial discusses channels, introduces and explains the channel.xml file, and demonstrates how to build a channel for distributing packages. Channels are ordinarily used to expose PEAR packages through the Internet, but enterprises can uses channels to make distribution of enterprise-specific PHP code easy.

You'll need to log in to the IBM developerWorks website to get to the good stuff (you do have a login, don't you?), but once you do, you'll find a guide that goes through:

• what PEAR is and what PEAR channels are
• channel management (including the channel.xml file)
• building the XML-RPC methods
• publishing the channel
• installing and upgrading a test package
• and some troubleshooting hints and further resources