What Does The Future Hold For PEAR?

With PHP 5.3 just over the horizon, I decided to see how well prepared WorkXpress was. Our coding standard is pretty strict and was developed to ensure that our application conforms to E_STRICT standards. However, we all know that some things are inevitably going to fall through the cracks.

The results of my research uncovered a few missed "is_a()"s and "=&"s, but for the most part our code was clean. I was pointed to a large amount of code that failed E_STRICT, PEAR. Because PEAR and many of its packages are written in PHP 4, it is missing many things that would make it E_STRICT compliant. Some, but not all, of these are listed below:

Using the static keyword to define static functions
Using public/protected/private to define class methods
Using public/protected/private to define class properties (var is deprecated)
Using instance of in place of is_a() (is_a() is deprecated)
Eliminating the use of the deprecated =& assignment operator
Not sure if there are any, but removing any PHP short tags (ie. <?) (deprecated)

Fortunately, PEAR appears to be focusing more on future proofing their code rather than backwards compatibility. Unfortunately, there are still many packages still written in PHP 4 (Mail and Mail_Mime for example). While a visit to http://pear.php.net/packages.php?php=5 shows there are 121 PEAR packages written in PHP 5, there are still 314 written in PHP 4. It sounds like PEAR still has a ways to go in order to be E_STRICT compliant.