new pear setup

I’ve just commited PEAR 1.8.1 to the tree (and will do 1.9.0 shortly to get us up to speed), but I wanted to let users know about a change in the way packages are installed.  Actually, it only affects the base packages.  Up until now, the PEAR-PEAR package in portage included all the necessary deps in one ebuild.  With this new version, I’ve split each package up into its own ebuild.

There’s a couple of reasons for this, but the most important is that it will give us flexibility to deal with changes from upstream.  For example, with 1.8.1 and above, PEAR changed it’s base XML dependency to XML_Util.  That one was already in the tree, and so the new pear base system relies on that.  If the other base ones change between versions, we can focus on that.

Another nice little change is that the base system ebuild now is just dev-php/pear.  So, “emerge pear” and you’re done.

The new versions are all currently marked as unstable across the arches.  I would appreciate any and all feedback on the change.  I’m still a bit skeptical that this is the best approach, and a bit nervous at any fallout that may occur, so please file bug reports and let me know if you have any issues.  Thanks, all. 🙂

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