Posted by Adam Harvey on 08/29/07 06:34

On Mon, 27 Aug 2007 09:39:11 -0700, Vale wrote:
> I would like to know if on a system with
>
> PEAR Version: 1.3.2
> PHP Version: 4.3.10
>
> it is possible to update the version of pear without updating the
> version of php in order to install recent versions of pear modules
> without changing the php.

Definitely. PEAR itself still runs fine on PHP 4, although you should
probably consider upgrading to 4.4.7 for non-PEAR reasons to do with
security.

Note that 1.3.2 is a _really_ old version of PEAR, though, and upgrading
will be slightly more difficult than just running "pear upgrade PEAR".
The instructions are at http://pear.php.net/news/package.xml.1.0.php, but
it basically boils down to running four pretty simple upgrade commands at
the command line.

> Moreover, does this make sense? I think that probably many pear modules
> can be used with php4, also if cannot be installed with old version of
> pear (am I wrong?) For a given pear module is anyware documented the
> supported php version?

You can see which version of PHP a given PEAR package requires by going
to the "Download" tab of the package home page. For example, the relevant
page for the MDB2 package is at http://pear.php.net/package/MDB2/
download, and indicates that it has a dependency on PHP 4.3.2 or later.

Note that you will need to upgrade PEAR to at least version 1.4 (and
preferably the current version 1.6.1) before you can install a lot of
recent package versions, as the package metadata format changed from PEAR
1.3 to 1.4.

Adam

--
To e-mail: don't make an example out of me!

[Back to original message]