Before you install PEAR, we recommend you understand
what PEAR is and why you
should install it.
The base installation that comes with the PHP distribution,
contains all the stuff
that is needed to run the PEAR installation tools etc. If you have
a recent installation of PHP, you can relax: The PEAR base
installation is already there, unless you have compiled your PHP
with the ./configure flag
--without-pear.
The packages that do not come with PHP can be installed with the PEAR
package manager. The manager handles installation similar to Debian's
"apt-get" package management
utility, as well as others such as "yum". Again:
If you are running a recent version of PHP (> 4.3.0) you can skip
the next section. But if you are running PHP 4.2.* or earlier, you
need to manually install the manager.
Apart from installing packages,
the PEAR package manager also
handles some other tasks: It can create new packages on your
machine, manage a registry of installed packages, check
dependencies and it can interact with services on pear.php.net,
and other PEAR compatible channel servers
to get information about available packages.
