Lot 49: Greg Beaver's blog

I was surprised to hear a colleague today ask how to upgrade from PEAR 1.3.6 to the latest 1.5.0, as the security holes in PEAR 1.3.6 and earlier have been pulbicly known for well over a year now. When I inquired as to why he was using PEAR 1.3.6, he explained that Max OS X ships with PEAR 1.3.6. I won't get into the questionable business practice of shipping software with known security holes that have had known fixes for years. Instead, I would like to offer simple step-by-step instructions of how to upgrade from outdated buggy PEAR versions to the latest stable release, 1.5.0.

pear upgrade Console_Getopt-1.2.1 Archive_Tar-1.3.1 PEAR-1.4.3
pear upgrade PEAR

These two commands will be sufficient to upgrade any system running PEAR 1.3.3 or newer. If you are running a REALLY outdated version of PEAR, you are far better off starting over from scratch using http://pear.php.net/go-pear, which should be downloaded and saved as go-pear.php, then run via:

php go-pear.php

These simple steps will allow any system to be upgraded. Note that if you're running something like version 1.3.0 of PEAR, you could risk running:

pear upgrade PEAR-1.3.6

and then try upgrading to PEAR using the 2 lines listed above. But for God's sake, don't stick with PEAR 1.3.6 or earlier, that is just asking for trouble.