In his latest post Padraic Brady talks about an effort that's been put out there (by Stuart Herbert) to come up with a PEAR channel aggregator - something he fully supports.

Since we seem to like blaming the PEAR Group, and getting that ball kicked back to us, it's time we did something useful. We've spent too much time ignoring PEAR as we grew apart from it with our frameworks, standalone libraries and custom plugin architectures. We're making life harder for ourselves in doing so. Stuart Herbert has posted a short article to gather requirements for a Pear Channel Aggregator. I strongly suggest that interested PHP programmers drop by and add a comment with some suggestions/feedback.

Stuart's suggestion has already gathered some good comments and suggestions from all around the community including some mentions of efforts from the Symfony project to do something similar.