Saturday, 10 February 2007

PEAR 1.3.6 Officially Called Off from PEAR List

The PEAR web site has recently announced that users of PEAR 1.3.6 or older won’t be able to install or upgrade packages as of January 1, 2008. The post on the web site informs you that on the given date the XML-RPC server at pear.php.net will be shut down, to be permanently replaced by the newer, more scalable REST interface that was introduced with PEAR version 1.4.0. Users who upgrade to PEAR 1.5.0 or the latest stable version of PEAR will be unaffected by this change, and will not notice any difference, the post informs.

The post says although most people will not have difficulty but for some systems, upgrading from ancient versions of PEAR can be tricky. So, some steps are shown in the post to replace a version of PEAR older than 1.4.0. The steps are as follows:

pear upgrade --force PEAR-1.3.6 Archive_Tar-1.3.1 Console_Getopt-1.2
pear upgrade PEAR-1.4.3
pear upgrade --force PEAR-1.4.11
pear upgrade PEAR

The post further explains those who have PEAR versions 1.4.0 to 1.4.3 should skip the first line that upgrades to PEAR version 1.3.6. It advises that users who are using the web frontend would benefit from a clean start—download go-PEAR from http://pear.php.net/go-pear, saving it as go-pear.php and re-installing PEAR from overwriting the existing installation. It instructs that the instructions are in a comment at the top of the file, that can be read directly in the http://pear.php.net/go-pear web site.

The post also briefs that from February 1, 2007, the release uploader at pear.php.net will no longer accept packages created using only package.xml 1.0. This in turn will affect developers who are authoring and releasing PEAR packages but the end users who wish to install PEAR packages will be spared. However, it informs you that this will only affect packages released after February 1, 2007 and not existing releases.

In order to maintain compatibility with PEAR 1.3.6 and earlier, package releases may be created with both a package.xml (version 1.0) and a package2.xml(version 2.0) the post says to use the following command:

pear package package.xml package2.xml

It also guides you to create a package.xml version 2.0 from an existing package.xml version 1.0 by simply running the pear convert command in the same directory as your
package.xml.

For assistance and installation-related questions, shoot a mail here: pear-general@lists.php.net.