In case, you have not heard about PECL yet or not yet trusted in it, read Wez’ posting to the internals mailinglist. In summary, PECL will make release management and installation of PHP extensions much smarter:

• PECL provides a way to keep your extensions self contained and allows you to keep your own release cycle.
• In addition, the packaging systems allows you to mark the package with explicit, versioned, dependencies.
• It is very easy to our users to install and upgrade these “pickled” extensions.

The ZZ/OSS Installer is based on the same packaging technology as PECL and makes release management and installation of PHP applications just as smart 😉