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.