A PHP internals mailing list discussion about a proposed RFC to deprecate PEAR and officially recommend Composer as the standard PHP package manager. The RFC was initially submitted by James Titcumb but quickly withdrawn after a private PHP Foundation Slack discussion revealed complications: PEAR is maintained by a separate group outside the PHP GitHub organization, and PHP core developers lack access to the PEAR servers or GitHub org. The thread reveals consensus around two more actionable steps: unbundling PEAR/PECL from php-src (with an initial pull request opened) and removing pear.php.net from the php.net domain. There is broad agreement that Composer should be acknowledged as the de-facto standard package manager, but the governance and ownership complexities around PEAR itself make a formal deprecation RFC difficult to execute.
