Anti Veeranna

Lets suppose you are learning to build PEAR packages (Pirum is a very nice PEAR channel server btw). You managed to create and publish the initial version of the package and it even installed just fine after you ‘pear install’-ed it.

Then you fixed a bug in the source, increased the version number in package.xml, built and published the next version. The new version is listed at the Pirum generated page.

• But ‘pear upgrade channel/Package’ does not ugprade to newest version.
• Forcing upgrade with -f does not help either.
• Uninstalling and reinstalling the package still gets the previous version.
• channel-update does not help.
• After uninstalling the package, removing the source from Pirum, regenerating the index and trying to reinstall you get a nice error stating that this version does not exist at the server.

I was really puzzled by all that. Then I discovered the reason – by looking at pear configuration.

$ pear config-get cache_ttl
3600

Channel contents are cached for that many seconds (3600 = 1 hour). The solution is to either reduce this number, or – preferrably – nuke the cache by

$ pear cache-clear

After this your package will upgrade just fine ;)

Its very logical to cache this information of course to avoid killing package servers and I feel really stupid for not figuring it out earlier.