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PEAR stands for 'Php Extension and Application Repository' and its first stable version has been released on December 27th, 2002, with Php 4.3.0.
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Pear is basically a collection of Php Classes and functions, useful to the Php Users. The code in Pear is partitioned in packages, which are separate projects with their own developers, releases, documentation and a defined relation to other packages.
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Pear defines a package tree, where each node in the tree is represented by a part of the package name. The nodes are organized by simple descriptive topics, and each part is separated by an underscore. Examples of package names are "HTTP_Post", "NET_Socket" and "Auth_HTTP".
Packages may relate to each other through explicit dependencies, but there isn't an automatic relation between a package and its "parent" in the package tree.
There are three top-level nodes in the package tree have special functions, and they are called "sub-repositories". These three top-level nodes are PECL (PHP Extension Code Library), Gtk and App.
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These three top-level nodes have particular functions.
PECL (PHP Extension Code Library) is a sub-repository of PEAR for C extensions, like those built for PHP. In fact, PECL was also created because C extensions needs to move somewhere else. PECL extensions are distributed and installed as PEAR packages but they follow PHP's coding standards rather than PEAR's (PEAR extensions have a different standard coding standard -- see http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.php -- than PHP's one).
GTK sub-repository has been created to host PHP-GTK packages that have to be useful to software made with PHP-GTK. PHP-GTK packages must follow the PEAR's coding standard -- see http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.php.
Applications packages have not been developed yet.
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