From Greg Beaver's blog today, he has this look at the current adoption rate of the latest versions of PEAR, 1.4.X.

The first time I checked the httpd access log for pear.php.net was about 2 weeks after the release of PEAR 1.4.0, and adoption was up to only about 10%, as could be expected. Much of resistance to migrating to the new package.xml 2.0 format is that it is not supported by PEAR 1.3.x and older, and supporting both formats can be onerous.

So, to help track the actual adoption rate, I created a simple script to grab the .tgz download rate ordered by pre-PEAR 1.4.1 and post-PEAR 1.4.1. Much to my surprise, here are the numbers:

• 998 downloads in /home/greg/stats20051206/stats1.3
• 28058 downloads in /home/greg/stats20051206/stats1.4

That's over twenty-eight times the number of downloads for the 1.4.x series! It's wonderful to see the incredible adoption rate like this. The numbers he represents also reflect how many users are the "download and install" type rather than just using the "pear install" to grab the relevant packages...