PEAR design and maintainability

Earlier this month Stig mentioned something about a scheme for "letting
companies define their own 'corners' of the package space". 
Here at Ethicon Endo-Surgery we came up with a simple way to do something
like that.  In our include path in php.ini we have two directories ees-lib
and pear-lib in that order.  The pear-lib directory contains the most recent
PEAR files from CVS. The ees-lib directory contains an EES directory which
contains all of our in house classes (an EES package to avoid name
conflicts).  Ees-lib also contains any changes or extensions that we have
made to PEAR; for example if we made a change to DB_common or simply added a
class to a package we would duplicate the directory structure under ees-lib
for the DB package containing only the files that we changed or added.
Since ees-lib is in the include path before pear-lib the changed and added
files will be included or required instead.  Keeping our files in
ees-lib/EES/ also lets us easily update pear-lib without worrying about
wiping out anything that we have done.

I am not quit sure if this addresses the issue but others may find this
helpful.

Adam