Upon determining your code fits into PEAR, you should get started with the PEAR community. In this chapter we will provide several ways, in which you can establish a first contact with the other PEAR developers, which will hopefully be your future open source fellows. Additionally we will tell you the different places, where you can find more information about the inner workings and rules of PEAR.
Mailing lists naturally are the most important way to communicate in projects like PEAR. We are running a number of public mailing lists, which are listed on the PEAR website. For starters the PEAR developers mailing list pear-dev@lists.php.net is of major importance for you: This mailing list is the place where the maintainers get together to discuss various aspects of their packages and this list is also the place where new packages are discussed.
If you would like to get started with maintaining packages in PEAR, you are expected to be subscribed to this mailing list. (Subscription instructions)
Note: During your first steps in the PEAR community, you may stumble across the term "pear-dev", which is the abbreviation for the developers mailing list in PEAR's lingo.
Some people enjoy communicating via IRC channels. We are running the channel #pear in the server network of EFnet. At this channel some of the most active PEAR developers hang out regularly. However for serious inquiries or discussions, you should mail to the developers mailing list.