Was the removal of most pear package in 4.3.11 intentional?
Yes.
Has this been announced somewhere? I did not see anything in ChangeLog and release notes.
The only other change being considered for the future would be to make it easier to install PEAR by providing a single file containing all resources, but this is still very much on the drawing board, and would not affect the packages ultimately installed.
If you have a shell-account and you are superuser, it is not difficult to install pear/packages. If you are not superuser, it becomes more difficult. But if you don't have a shell-account installation becomes really hard. go-pear for web does not work 100%, same for web-installer. Some people cannot use it at all, because it simply does not work. So often your only option is to install pear/packages by uploading the extracted php-files from your PC.
The plan is to rely on users installing these packages. It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the bundles, and because older versions were often bundled, it introduced potential security risks as well.
One of the biggest problems of pear is, that most people simply cannot use it! If I recommend people using pear-package XY, in 4 of 5 cases the user could not use the package because it is not installed, and he has no idea how to get it work. I know it is possible, but if you install it the first time it could become really hard.
If you want to rely on users to install packages (which is a good idea IMHO) all users (not only superusers) need a reliable tool for installation/management (also without shell-account).
best regards Andreas
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