The Symfony project is recommending you upgrade your plugins to the latest editions - an issue with the PEAR channel caused it to load the wrong ones:

A problem in the symfony project PEAR channel made the plugin-install task always install the oldest version of the plugins, instead of the latest. If you recently installed plugins with the symfony command line, you probably installed an outdated version. Plugins installed via SVN are not affected.

You'll need to run a plugin-upgrade command for each of the plugins installed on your system to ensure that you're completely up to date. The post has complete info on how to tell which plugins you have and the exact commands to issue to being them up to date.

Travis Swicegood talks about some updates he's made to the Ctrx_PEAR_Channel_Frontend package to make some updates for creating PEAR channels.

The code's great and provides a good jumping off point, but I thought it needed some updates. Davey's been a busy guy and I had a few free hours every other evening or so for a few, so I decided to start extending it.

Among the things he changed were some updates to the frontend text (to move away from hard-coded and into a more templated style) and the push of these changes into two new packages: Domain51_PEAR_Channel and Domain51_PEAR_Channel_Frontend. Together they allow access to the tables that Chiara_PEAR_Server creates and an extension system that allows for what he calls "package extras".