Innovating the future: Package.xml 1.0, and PEAR 1.3.6 are officially deprecated

[February 1, 2007]

If you are using PEAR 1.3.6 or older, you will no longer be able to install or upgrade packages as of January 1, 2008. On this day, 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. For assistance upgrading PEAR to the latest version, or for other installation-related questions or concerns, please send an email message to the pear-general mailing list at pear-general@lists.php.net.

Although most people will not have difficulty, for some systems, upgrading from ancient versions of PEAR can be tricky. If you are running a version of PEAR older than 1.4.0, follow these simple steps:

pear upgrade --force http://pear.php.net/get/PEAR-1.3.6.tgz http://pear.php.net/get/Archive_Tar-1.3.1 http://pear.php.net/get/Console_Getopt-1.2
pear upgrade http://pear.php.net/get/PEAR-1.4.3
pear upgrade --force PEAR-1.4.11
pear upgrade PEAR

Those who have PEAR versions 1.4.0 to 1.4.3 should simply skip the first line that upgrades to PEAR version 1.3.6. Users who are using the web frontend would probably benefit the most from a clean start - download go-pear from http://pear.php.net/go-pear, save as go-pear.php and re-install PEAR from scratch, overwriting your existing installation. Instructions are in a comment at the top of the file, or you can read them directly off of the http://pear.php.net/go-pear website.

Effective February 1, 2007, the release uploader at pear.php.net will no longer accept packages created using only package.xml 1.0. This affects developers who are authoring and releasing PEAR packages, not end users who wish to install PEAR packages. This only affects packages released after February 1, 2007, and will not be "grandfathered" to existing releases.

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) using this command:

pear package package.xml package2.xml

To create a package.xml version 2.0 from an existing package.xml version 1.0, simply run the pear convert command in the same directory as your package.xml. Please email the development mailing list for support with this process.