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It would be nice if /usr/bin/pear and /usr/share/pear were in a php-pear subpackage so that it would be easy to upgrade pear independently of PHP.
They'd get dropped on upgrades then, though (unless php required php-pear, which would kind of defeat the point?) - this won't happen too soon.
Actually having php require php-pear is the right answer, IMHO, and doesn't defeat the point. The point is to allow the PHP files in php-pear to be upgraded independently of the php binary. PHP 4.2.2 contains a fairly old copy of pear. It has many bugs compared to a current version. For example, I use the DB classes for a project I'm working on. The pgsql backend in 4.2.2 contains a bug that doesn't handle booleans correctly. Currently, in order to fix this, I have to replace the php package completely as /usr/share/pear/DB/pgsql.php is in the same subpackage as the apache DSO. If php-pear were a seperate subpackage I could create a php-pear package to replace it and leave the perfectly good php binaries alone.
Reopening this for the taroon beta. Taroon has PHP 4.3.2 in it, which has a fairly old set of PEAR base classes included. If there was a php-pear subpackage, then upgrading the base classes would be easy, and possible without recompiling all of php or manually overwriting files.
Sorry for churning out the same old tune again, but this is too late for Taroon, Peter. I'll look at doing this for Cambridge first.
php-pear is now split out for Fedora Core 2: thanks for the suggestion.