State of the PEAR project

I was reading last night an excellent article about the state of the PEAR project by the PEAR contributor AARON wormus in the latest php|arch edition September 2006. The PEAR project has taken some heat on the blogs and mailing lists recently. Does the rush to Enterprise PHP 5 frameworks signal the beginning of the end for the project, or does PEAR provide a unique platform for stable code as well as code deployment? To better investigate these questions Aaron takes a walk through the history of PEAR to see where it came from, and attempts to determine where it is going. To conclude Aaron thanked those who contributed in the article with their comments and suggestion !

While I find personaly the current state of the PEAR project is a little confusing as a part of the PHP project. Maybe integrate the Zend Framework will be a better option for PHP5, as the framework is more organized, written by a group of known contributor, compatible with PHP5, and fully oriented for the entreprise. Or what does PEAR offer a better alternative ? The best option in PEAR are the package “PEAR” itself and the “PEAR installer”, so after many years of development are these the only options that we are really using ? Maybe this is what should be kept as part of the core.