Although PEAR is currently bundled with the main PHP distro, having PEAR built as part of the main PHP build is rather inconvenient. It prevents upgrading PEAR separately (upstream PEAR is now considerably newer than the PEAR bundled with PHP, and includes highly useful fixes to RPM handling). Additionally, as we have seen recently, security or other bugs within bundled PEAR packages (e.g. XML_RPC) require the rebuild of the entire PHP suite to fix a couple of lines of runtime PEAR code. Ideally php should be compiled using --without-pear, and a separate PEAR SRPM should be made available. I have done some preliminary investigation and it seems that the script on http://go-pear.org/ is able to bootstrap a minimal PEAR installation into a buildroot, which could then be packaged up as php-pear (not forgetting appropriate Provides: - see bug #173806) As an aside, Gentoo have apparently reached the same conclusion: http://www.sebastian-bergmann.de/blog/archives/467-Upcoming-PEAR-Changes-in-Gentoo-Linux.html NB a repackaging could also potentially slim down a bit - as per bug #173808
Tim, thanks for filling all the reports. I definitely agree that splitting out php-pear to a separate source RPM is a good idea. It really needs to be done from a tarball not from running a script; have you attempted that? The PEAR-x.y.z.tgz tarballs available from: http://pear.php.net/package/PEAR should be the starting point. Possibly the pear/install-pear.php script from the PHP tarball is needed to boostrap the installation.
Yep, I appreciate it needs to be built from a source tarball to be packaged properly. I only meant using go-pear to do a local installation in conjunction with the source tarball, not trying to pull it in remotely (I'm not sure if it can use a local source rather than remote though). I have been poking around with the PEAR-1.4.5.tgz tarball a bit. I hadn't yet looked at how the PHP source tarball installs PEAR, but the pear/install-pear.php script from the main PHP tarball looks like it's what we should be focusing on. I'll dig a bit deeper when I get a chance; at the moment I'm trying to roll up some of the low-hanging (and more urgent, for me) fixes (e.g. bug #173806, bug #173814, bug #173980) into a local build so that I can install a vanilla (locally-built) php/php-pear RPM and be able to do "pear makerpm [package] && rpmbuild -ba [spec]" and actually get an RPM that works to at least a basic level of usefulness and conforms to conventions.
I've checked in initial php-pear packaging now, it will be built shortly along with 5.1.1.
php-pear-1.4.5-2 on its way to Raw Hide, file bugs if there are problems.