[pkg-php-pear] Automatic creation of Debian packages out of the PEAR modules

[Thomas Goirand]

While listening to the FLOSS weekly podcast, I heard about FreeBSD
creating automatically packages for CPAN modules when these aren't
available in the distribution.

This gave me the idea to write such tool in Debian for PEAR packages.

If a PEAR package isn't available, then the only option is to do:
pear install $package

What we could do would be something like:
deb-pear-build --channel pear.phpunit.de --package <whatever>

Then <whatever> would get downloaded in a build-area folder, and
converted to a Debian package. Then eventually, with a -i option, it
could be automatically installed. Options like --depends could help to
write dependencies if they need to be tweaked manually (they often do...).

I don't think this would be hard to write, considering the set of tools
we already have (eg: pkg-php tools). Of course, this wouldn't replace
packaging stuff in Debian manually, but it still would be better for our
users to have PEAR packages installed in a Debian package format than
having them installed with "pear install".

Such tool really could be written out of few shell scripts.

Any thoughts on this anyone?
Any idea on a nice name for such tool?

Cheers,

Thomas