Defininition of the "last" package versions

We can install PHP extensions by fetching them from the PECL website with

pecl install <package-handle>[-<spec>]

Where <spec> can be:
- a stability state (snapshot, devel, alpha, beta, or stable) [1]
- a version marching ^\d+(\.\d+)*([a-zA-Z]+\d*)?$ [2]

if <spec> is not specified, it's assumed to be "stable" [3]

When pecl resolves the actual version to be installed, it fetches
http://pecl.php.net/rest/r/<package-handle>/allreleases.xml and
returns the first version that's exactly the version specified, or has
at least the stability specified [4].

The versions in the allreleases.xml file are sorted by the release date [5].

That way, pecl considers as the "last" stable version the most recent one.

This works fine for packages that are published in a "linear" way.

Problems arise when there are multiple versions maintained for a
package (grpc and protobuf are good examples).

For example, protobuf maintainers published version 3.21.6 on
2022-09-13 and version 3.18.3 one day later.
So, in its allreleases.xml file [6] we have that 3.18.3 comes before
3.21.6, and pecl would have picked up the former instead of the
latter.
And this is a big problem: users aren't installing the most recent
"stable" version [7].

I think that the easiest and cleanest solution would be to fix the
code that generates the allreleases.xml file: it should sort the
versions with the version_compare() PHP function.

If that's OK, I can submit a pull request to the web-pecl repository,
and someone who has access should regenerate the allreleases.xml files
for every package published on the PECL archive.


[1]: https://github.com/pear/pear-core/blob/ed08e2b2200980d9787211f81655f11f491d22dc/PEAR/Registry.php#L2322
[2]: https://github.com/pear/pear-core/blob/ed08e2b2200980d9787211f81655f11f491d22dc/PEAR/Registry.php#L2326
[3]: https://github.com/pear/pear-core/blob/ed08e2b2200980d9787211f81655f11f491d22dc/PEAR/Config.php#L217
[4]: https://github.com/pear/pear-core/blob/ed08e2b2200980d9787211f81655f11f491d22dc/PEAR/REST/10.php#L89
[5]: https://github.com/php/web-pecl/blob/706b4b0e4e3186f513ada25a283d84df7f8e0286/src/Rest.php#L430
[6]: https://pecl.php.net/rest/r/protobuf/allreleases.xml
[7]: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/issues/10619