End PEAR Project Endorsement proposal

In voting; not accepted. On 2026-10-05 at 13:18 UTC the author announced on the internals list that voting had opened. The RFC page (now version 1.0.0, status Voting, last modified 2026-10-05 13:11 UTC) and the official RFC index both list it as voting. There is one primary question, "Stop endorsing PEAR?", which needs a 2/3 majority. The poll closes on 2026-10-19 at 13:15 UTC. When the page was inspected at about 16:05 UTC on 5 October it showed 14 Yes, 0 No and 0 Abstain; at about 04:05 UTC on 6 October it showed 21 Yes, 0 No and 0 Abstain; at about 04:02 UTC on 7 October it showed 23 Yes, 0 No and 0 Abstain; at about 10:02 UTC on 7 October it showed 24 Yes, 0 No and 0 Abstain. Those are interim counts in an open poll, not a result.

What is proposed

The RFC would end the PHP project's endorsement of the independent PEAR project in four steps:

1. Serve the public pages of pear.php.net (package details, downloads, manuals, public bug reports) as a static archive. The browsable archive, including the endpoints legacy PEAR CLI clients use, would remain until 2027-12-31 and then be offered only as a download.
2. Stop installing or bundling the PEAR installer with PHP source, proposed for PHP 8.7. The RFC formalises an existing php-src pull request (#20124).
3. Remove PEAR references from official PHP websites and mention Composer as the community package manager. The RFC says this does not make Composer a PHP project.
4. Move the PEAR mailing lists to the inactive lists section.

Taking over governance of the PEAR package ecosystem is a stated non-goal; an independent team could continue PEAR under domains it controls.

Motivation stated by the RFC

The RFC says the PHP project has no access to PEAR's infrastructure although it is hosted on a php.net subdomain, cannot guarantee the integrity of the content served there, and that the site is unmaintained with broken features and spam. It cites PEAR metadata from 2026-06-22: 534 of 603 packages marked unmaintained, and 63 of the remaining 69 not updated for extended periods. These figures are the RFC's own count and were not independently re-measured here.

Affected users

According to the RFC, users would no longer get PEAR bundled with PHP but could install it manually, and users of the six packages still publishing on PEAR would need their Composer-installable versions. During the discussion the author stated that the static archive would keep serving installer resources (for example go-pear.phar and /rest/ paths) on the same domain, so the switch need not wait for unbundling.

History and discussion

Two earlier proposals were never brought to a vote: Deprecate PEAR/PECL & Replace with composer/pickle (2016, now Inactive in the index) and Deprecate PEAR and recommend Composer (2025, now Withdrawn). The RFC changelog for 2026-09-14 records support from a long-time PEAR Group member for sunsetting the website and removing PEAR from PHP source, and adds the archive timeline. The discussion thread continued on 2026-10-02. In the thread the author expected that a vote would not end before mid-October and that nothing would land before November. That was a plan stated before the vote opened.

The vote opened on 2026-10-05; the proposal and BC sections inspected that day match the summary above. The page's introduction also states that the PEAR web repository was recently archived. The RFC cites pear/pearweb, but that repository's archive state was not checked here.

Limitations: the vote is still open, so acceptance is not established, and an accepted RFC would still need implementation work. The php-src change it formalises, PR #20124, was re-checked on 2026-10-06. It is titled "PECL and PEAR removal", which is wider than this RFC's PEAR scope, and it is an open draft that has not been merged (last updated 2026-09-03). Nothing in released PHP has changed. Related: support windows.