2009-06-25
What is a PEAR Channel? PEAR Channels make it possible to take advantage of the strengths of the PEAR Installer and Pyrus for your own personal packages. A channel is simply a website that provides packages for download and a few extra meta-information files.
A familiar example of a channel is
pear.php.net.
This channel was the first channel, and defines the standards to which other
channels must adhere. Each channel has a channel.xml
file in its document root (such as
http://pear.php.net/channel.xml) and a series of files utilizing the
REST
(Representational State Transfer) paradigm to describe
the packages available for installation and download. The pear.php.net
channel's REST
files can be viewed at
http://pear.php.net/rest.