[PEAR] The future of pear.php.net

Good $dayPart everybody,

Apologies for cross-posting, but I wanted to reach everyone who might be 
invested.

There has been recent discussion on the PHP Internals list about the 
future of PEAR, and its relationship to the PHP Project 
[https://externals.io/message/128796]

There seems to be broad agreement to remove mentions of PEAR in the PHP 
source code (such as the "--with-pear" build option), and in the PHP 
manual, recognising that Composer is now much more widely used.

On the other hand, the pear tool itself is already maintained in a 
separate GitHub project, so no change is needed there.


The more contentious question is what should happen to the pear.php.net 
website and package channel. Two broad suggestions have been made:

1) Move the website and channel to a new domain, for someone to operate 
completely independent of the PHP project.

2) Shut down the website and channel completely, after some suitable 
notice period, probably leaving behind some kind of read-only archive.


However, it's not clear who has the authority and willingness to either 
migrate and maintain the site, or to decide and announce a shut-down 
schedule. In theory, this appears to be the responsibility of "the PEAR 
Group", but the list of members on the website is labelled as lasting 
"until June 15th, 2010".

I've been unable to find any official communications since around 2018, 
when https://blog.pear.php.net/ went offline, and various signs suggest 
the website is largely unmaintained.


If you have an opinion on how we should proceed, it would be great if 
you could contribute to the thread on the Internals mailing list 
[subscribe here: https://www.php.net/mailing-lists.php]. I'll try to 
watch out for replies elsewhere and forward or summarise them appropriately.

Thanks,

-- 
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]