Greg pointed to the latest release of PEAR_RemoteInstaller 0.3.0. This version is mainly a bugfixes release which include new support for FTPS and SFTP.
PEAR_RemoteInstaller is a package that makes it possible to synchronize installations of PEAR between a local computer and a remote computer, even if there is no shell access on the remote computer. To do this, it uses PHP’s ftp, ftps and ssh2.sftp streams to copy files installed locally to the remote system. This new version therefore requires PHP 5.1 or newer to take advantage of the power of ftp streams, and no longer depends on the Net_FTP PEAR package.
