Sara Golemon describes the path she took in a search for an OpenID library to work with in PHP. The trip took her through both PEAR and PECL with no promising results. Heading off to a Yahoo! search she comes up with one good result - Auth_OpenID.

Now, granted, this is the first OpenID system I've looked at, and I haven't really dug into it in depth, but I've got to say, this is some clean, well written code and the author clearly understands the maths involved (or at least fakes it shockingly good).

Knowing this, she asks "why isn't this in PEAR" if it's so well-structured and useful? It works with any version of PHP from 4 up and is smart enough to adapt itself to whatever the structure of your application might be.

There's also some great comments on the post where it's explained why the library isn't in PEAR, another OpenID package for PHP and suggestions for alternate distribution methods (PEAR channel).