Though there's no slides for his unconference PEAR2 talk, Joshua Eichorn has posted some of his planned features for the update to the popular PHP package repository:

I do have a list of new features planed(or already implemented) for the Pyrus installer.

The list includes:

• no installation necessary. It runs out of the box as a .phar. No go-pear.phar needed
• Pyrus is much more development/production-oriented, and will have a "deploy" command for managing deployment of development code to a production server
• out-of-the-box supported packaging formats include .tar, .tgz, .tbz, .zip, and .phar
• PHP 5.3+-based code means it fully utilizes cutting edge PHP features such as SPL iterators, XMLReader/XMLWriter, ZIP extension, phar extension (if enabled), exceptions
• full application support is available with the new www and cfg (configuration file) roles

Check out his post for more items on the list.