Ralph Schinder has posted about a new development in the world of Zend Framwork distribution - a PEAR channel.

For the past few months, the ZF team has been playing with the idea of releasing ZF from a PEAR channel. Over the past 2 years, we have seen a few channels distributing ZF that have pop up here and there.. so that lead us to believe there is an itch that needs scratching. The compelling reason against a PEAR channel is that, with ZF, there is nothing to "install". Just pop ZF in your include_path and off you go.

With the introduction of the next release (1.8) and the Zend_Tool component that comes with it, the framework is graduating from a "component library" into a more holistic framework with a more advanced distribution system. For those interested, he also includes the details of the channel (from pear.zfcampus.org) and the organizational plan of how the channel is laid out.

Stefan Koopmanschap has a recent post to his blog showing how to embed a distribution of the symfony framework in with the release of your application:

With symfony 1.0, one of the nice features was the freeze option, which allowed you to package the symfony libraries inside your project quite easily. This was very useful, for instance when deploying your project on a server where you couldn't install symfony. With symfony 1.1, it is apparently not advised anymore to use the freeze option (even though it is still available). So how should this be done then? Let's have a look...

He steps through the process, first setting up a subversion repository then putting a copy of symfony in to the lib/vendor directory and use the svn:externals to link to it.