Comment 10 for bug 420639

Given that the bad PEAR phar was packaged with both the 5.2.10 and 5.2.11 releases of PHP, the "fix" should definitely be creating your working PEAR installation by using the current working phar file from [1] rather than from one that was included with those two PHP releases. Judging from the file list I see for the karmic package [2], I'm not sure I can guess why you are experiencing "wont work build will fail". Don't you build the karmic package using the files from a successful PEAR installation?

[1] -- http://pear.php.net/install-pear-nozlib.phar
[2] -- http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/all/php-pear/filelist