Update: http://pear.php.net/~greg/stats has these statistics, and will be auto-updated daily so that changes can be tracked over time.
One of the minor changes in PEAR 1.4.1 and newer was the user agent string sent whenever you use the installer to remotely access the internet. In earlier versions, it was "PHP/phpversion" as in "PHP/4.3.11". In PEAR 1.4.1 and newer, it sends "PEAR/pearversion/PHP/phpversion".
This is very helpful information for those of us who are wondering about the adoption of PEAR, and also who is using which PHP version. The first time I checked the httpd access log for pear.php.net was about 2 weeks after the release of PEAR 1.4.0, and adoption was up to only about 10%, as could be expected. Much of resistance to migrating to the new package.xml 2.0 format is that it is not supported by PEAR 1.3.x and older, and supporting both formats can be onerous.
So, to help track the actual adoption rate, I created a simple script to grab the .tgz download rate ordered by pre-PEAR 1.4.1 and post-PEAR 1.4.1. Much to my surprise, here are the numbers:
998 /home/greg/stats20051206/stats1.3
28058 /home/greg/stats20051206/stats1.4
That is 998 downloads with PEAR 1.3.x versus 28,058 downloads with PEAR 1.4.x! This is better than 96% adoption rate of PEAR 1.4.x just 3 months after its release. To be sure, the security issue in PEAR 1.4.2 and older has spurred increased adoption, but I never expected numbers like these so soon.
It should also be noted that many users simply don't ever upgrade the PEAR that comes with their PHP version, and so these numbers can't reflect actual on-disk usage of PEAR, but it does describe a useful sub-population: people who will download and install your package via the "pear install Blah" command sequence.
In other words, barring a large population of users who download PEAR packages via Internet Explorer and then install it locally with "pear install Package-1.2.3.tgz", PEAR 1.4.x and consequently package.xml 2.0 is fully mainstream, and PECL/PEAR developers can seriously consider switching over to the new format much sooner than expected.
Also interesting is the PHP versions used:
-bash-2.05b$ grep -c PHP/4.1 stats1.4
0
-bash-2.05b$ grep -c PHP/4.2 stats1.4
46
-bash-2.05b$ grep -c PHP/4.3 stats1.4
5958
-bash-2.05b$ grep -c PHP/4.4 stats1.4
4963
-bash-2.05b$ grep -c PHP/5.0 stats1.4
7255
-bash-2.05b$ grep -c PHP/5.1 stats1.4
9836
PHP 5.1 is the most used version by active PEAR developers, with PHP 5.0 followed by PHP 4.3. PHP 4.4 does not appear to be catching on as strongly with active PEAR users.
