What the dill with pecl: Is pear still around for PHP 8?

It's a bit confusing determining whether pear/pecl are still around in PHP 8.0. There's been talk of removing it entirely from PHP for years (just do some searching and you'll see the various RFCs).

There’s a lot of confusing stuff out there. The official PHP Docker images currently do not have it installed for their 8.0-RC images, citing that pear has been removed in PHP 8.0. However PHP's documentation on Migrating from PHP 7.4.x to PHP 8.0.x doesn’t mention removal of it. In fact, it even mentions that the XML-RPC extension "has been moved to PECL."

So what gives?

It appears that the --with-pear option is still around for configuring PHP builds from source. When you use it, the build states:

configure: WARNING: The --with-pear option is deprecated

This is the same warning you'll see if you build PHP 7.4.

As far as I can tell, Pear and Pecl are here to stay in PHP 8.0. As such, I created a Pull Request on the official PHP Docker images to add the --with-pear option to the 8.0-RC builds.

⁉️ Those in the know: can you weigh in on this? Are pear and pecl still going to be the official way to install Pecl extensions in PHP 8.0.x? Or should we start transitioning to pickle?