Greg pointed to a very interesting information about PEAR and PECL adoption, The script run on a daily basis and check for the version of PEAR and PECL used with PHP from the installer logs on php.net server. The rate displayed is for the PEAR1.3/PEAR1.4 versions it gives also informations about the version of PHP used but I don’t know exactly which data is used for that.
One of the minor changes in PEAR 1.4.1 and newer was the user agent string sent whenever you use the installer to remotely access the internet. In earlier versions, it was “PHP/phpversion” as in “PHP/4.3.11”. In PEAR 1.4.1 and newer, it sends “PEAR/pearversion/PHP/phpversion”.
This is very helpful information for those of us who are wondering about the adoption of PEAR, and also who is using which PHP version. The first time I checked the httpd access log for pear.php.net was about 2 weeks after the release of PEAR 1.4.0, and adoption was up to only about 10%, as could be expected. Much of resistance to migrating to the new package.xml 2.0 format is that it is not supported by PEAR 1.3.x and older, and supporting both formats can be onerous.
The script have been running for just five days, and already giving very interesting informations : 96 to 97% of installation are using PEAR 1.4.0. There is more install of PEAR with PHP5 than PHP4 which is pretty interesting to see that people are start using more and more PHP5. But I was stopped at the PECL stats, which is using also PEAR installer also. Most interesting PECL packages are written for PHP5 but there is still frew usage of some extension for PHP4.
Also for PECL the usage of PEAR 1.4.0 is up to 97% during the five latest days. I have made few stats using the current available informations, it was interesting to see in addition to the evolution of PEAR 1.4 adoption, the number of installation of PEAR grouped by PHP version, which bring a good information about the evolution of PHP 5.1 adoption. The latest two graphs are for both PEAR1.3 and 1.4.
