@phpdeveloper.org
Matthew Weir O'Phinney has this note for those working with the Phly PEAR channel - he's added a darcs repository to manage the contents of the channel.
If you're not familiar with darcs, it's a revision control system, similar to GNU Arch and git; changes are kept as patch sets, and repositories are branched simply by checking them out. This makes darcs repositories very flexible, and incredibly easy to implement. Static binaries are available for most systems, which makes it easy to install on systems to which you have no administrator rights.
There's also a web-based interface to it that uses Perl/XML/XSLT to create it, but he found it a bit constrictive and not customizable at all - so he ported it to PHP (using Cgiapp2), the result being Phly_Darcs.