Does PEAR have the ability to install packages to a user-specified folder on demand? I’d like to be able to do something like this to install a new copy of PHPUnit to a project I’m messing around with:
pear install phpunit TARGET=~/sources/project/test/lib
Is that sort of operation supported by PEAR? I’d like to use PEAR because of its ability to grab all of the dependencies seamlessly.
Yes, you can use custom configuration files. As ajreal already wrote, http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.shared.php contains instructions how to use custom config files.