PEAR: Portability vs. Flexibility

[rheroux]

Hey folks. I've been using PHP for about a year and a half now and I'm starting to develop a web app for a client. Now, here's my dilemma:

PEAR is pretty good because it reduces a lot of my time. A lot of functionality has already been coded, so rather than recode it all myself, PEAR would be an obvious choice for me.

However, my problem is that what if the webserver I'm running my code on doesn't have PEAR installed and refuses to install it? I'd rather not have to code two different versions of the same webpage for obvious reasons.

Is it possible to "install" PEAR to a normal web directory? (e.g. Upload the appropriate files/packages in their uncompressed format and require/include the PEAR packages as needed.)

If this is possible, is it rather simple or is it a huge headache?

And if I did this, would my include/require's still work without having to change their paths? (e.g. require_once 'Mail.php'; would still include Mail.php.) Or would I have to fiddle with the paths?

I guess I could pre-emptively code the include/requires to use a variable for the paths as well.

If that's possible, then I'll probably end up using PEAR, however I'm not sure if it is.

Any information is appreciated.

[jara06]

knowing this is an old thread, but anyway for the curious 🙂

PEAR can be downloaded right off their website, unzipped and put in a separate folder.
like:
/www_root/
/www_root/lib/
/www_root/lib/PEAR/

Then there's no pain using it. You just have to do the upgrades manually later, and of course, make sure all the dependencies of the packages is present. No 'path-fiddling', it works right off.

(Note: If PEAR exists in a global (include maybe) folder, be carefull no to accidently import two different files. Maybe PEAR would try to import the globally available files instead ? anyone ?)