The End PEAR Project Endorsement RFC is about to go to a vote. Author Nick Sdot told internals today that he plans to open voting on September 28, 2026, if there are no objections.

The proposal itself hasn't changed since it first went to discussion in August. It unbundles the PEAR installer from PHP in 8.7, replaces pear.php.net with a static archive, points official PHP sites to Composer instead of PEAR, and moves the PEAR mailing lists to the inactive section. What changed is everything around it.

What's New

  • A PEAR maintainer is on board. Chuck Burgess, a long-time maintainer and PEAR Group member, reached out and said he supports sunsetting the site and removing PEAR from PHP source. Rowan Tommins noted that Chuck's agreement is "just one vote, not any kind of final authority," but still backs the RFC.
  • The archive has an end date. The browsable archive, including the endpoints the pear command line client uses, stays online until December 31, 2027. After that, it's available as a download only.
  • The missing bug reports are back. Many PEAR bug pages had stopped loading and looked lost, until Chuck recovered them for the archive.

Nothing breaks before PHP 8.7 either. The static archive keeps serving the same files on the same domain, including go-pear.phar and the /rest/ endpoints, so the site can switch before Jakub Zelenka's php-src pull request removing PEAR lands.

What Happens Next

Discussion stays open until at least September 27, and the vote needs a 2/3 majority to pass. Nick Sdot expects nothing to land before November.

Read the full proposal in the RFC, and follow the thread on externals.io.