Greg Beaver has a quick reminder on his blog for anyone out there running their own PEAR channels - "please watch pear-qa".

Just a quick note to all of you PEAR channel administrators: Please take a moment to either join the pear-qa@lists.php.net mailing list, or follow php.pear.qa at news.php.net. Why?

Every time a new release of the core PEAR package is slated, I (or whoever is in charge of the release) will post a message to the pear-qa list asking for testing of the new version 1 full week ahead of the scheduled release date. This is the one opportunity to test for critical errors that unit tests or myself have missed.

There's a specific instance he mentions of where this happened (in 1.4.7 involving channel names with a "-") and the code was still released. Of course, once it was applied, many users were upset that their installs had just "stopped working".

It would be very helpful to have channel administrators take a second to try out stable versions of PEAR as they approach release.