In this new post to his blog, Richard Thomas talks about a bug issue that he's "gotten in the middle of" and the conflict between the PHP group and the PEAR developers that came out of it.

Today I managed to get right in the middle of this. [...] Both pear and php are pointing the fingers at each other, neither seem to be able to work together and Im not even sure if either one of them has even taken the time to run my test code and realize what the issue is to begin with.

The problem comes when he created a a script with the Pear Mail, Mail_mime and Net_SMTP PEAR classes and, following the execution of the rest of the script, tried it both ways - turning the erro reporting back off or not messing with it at all. As a result, the code with the ending error_reporting() call throws an error, the one without does not.

Unfortunately, at the time of this writing both sides are still pointing at the other for blame on the issue.