Fabien Potencier has a new post to his site today talking about a recent trend in the PHP community around dependency and package management, the rise of Composer and the fall of PEAR.

As a good package manager to let user easily install plugin/bundles/MODs was probably also a big concern for phpBB, I talked to Nils about this topic during this 2011 hackday in San Francisco. After sharing my thoughts about libzypp, "..., I [Nils] wrote the first lines of what should become Composer a few months later". [...] So, what about PEAR? PEAR served the PHP community for many years, and I think it's time now to make it die.

He goes on to talk about how he personally has used PEAR in the past and when he stopped work on Phirum, a simplified PEAR channel manager. Based on some logging results, he found that most dependencies on his channels were related to PHPUnit's needs. When Sebastian Bergmann announced the move of PHPUnit away from PEAR Fabien decided to make his own move to deprecate and eventually remove new releases from the PEAR sources.