I recently upgraded my work computer from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 13.10. Trying to upgrade a pear package, I got the following error:
Ubuntu 13.10 ships with PHP 5.5.3, which changed the pack/unpack format strings a bit to align them to the Perl behavior. Unfortunately, this breaks backwards compatibility .
PEAR's Archive_Tar package used one of those now changed parameters and thus could not extract packages on PHP 5.5 until version 1.3.10. Version 1.3.11 fixes the issue and makes it compatible with 5.5
Now my problem was that the Ubuntu upgrade updated my PHP version, but not my manually managed PEAR installation. I thus had an old Archive_Tar version that did not work anymore with the new PHP version.
Luckily, fixing that issue was easy; I simply had to download and apply the patch :