Harry Fuecks took a look at ZZ/OSS Installer and his honest comments clearly describe the status of the application and its potential.

Yes, true, the latest release of the installer is a development release with known and still-to-be-found bugs 😉 We are collecting feedback from the community on new features and hidden bugs, that’s why we did this early release. Meanwhile, development goes on and we are fixing bugs and implementing new features for the next release 1.1.0dev2.

Although the application itself is not yet superstable, I believe it is good enough for experienced PHP devs to start deploying their applications with it. Developing and installing applications that entirely or partly consist of PEAR-like packages, is much easier with ZZ/OSS Installer compared to PEAR Installer, because there is e.g. automatic dependency resolving built in. This tutorial on deploying phpMyAdmin with ZZ/OSS Installer gives you a basic idea how to procede.

Should you encounter any problems, feel free to contact the ZZ/OSS Installer developers via the mailinglist, IRC, etc. as stated on the ZZ/OSS Installer project Website – we’ll do our best to help you. The nice thing is, that once you have a working ZZ/OSS Installer on your system, it is pretty easy to install the latest version with this installer from CVS sources.