After many months of blood, sweat and tears – none of it mine 
– the PEAR project has released PEAR 1.4.0 final.
Greg Beaver has almost single handedly taken and re-written the entire PEAR installer stuff, adding support for:
- Channels – package and release your own code
- improving PECL/extension support on *nix (i.e. compiling the extension using “pear install pecl/PACKAGE)
- Adding binary extension support for Win32
- Adding almost 700 Unit Tests
- Removing the use of XML-RPC completely (now using REST)
I fully believe that Greg has taken PEAR to the next level, with this being the most featureful, stable release ever.
Good job Greg and everyone else too!
Perhaps now, all those PEAR-haters will make the switch 
– Davey