In his latest post, Padraic Brady takes a look at PEAR in a verb form - both in how you can use it and what sorts of things it has in store.

over the last few months after finally getting over my ignorance of PEAR beyond it being a hodge podge of packages of dubious quality I've been questioning whether pearifying my future and past code is worthwhile. The answer is a resounding YES.

Unfortunately, there are some barriers for most people to get into the PEAR world (including the lack of the "coolest packages") with some of the perceived barriers including:

• PEAR will require large scale changes to my shiny new cool code
• PEAR only allows proposals for complete functional code
• PEAR is elitist
• PEAR is fossilised

He also talks about PEAR packages and dispels one of the most popular myths about the package repository - "you can't use PEAR on a shared host".