Why bloated packages are bad
Greg used to download 13 packages "Archive_Tar, Auth_SASL, Cache_Lite, Console_Getopt, File_Archive, Mail, Mail_Mime, MIME_Type , Net_SMTP, Net_Socket, PEAR, System_Command, XML_RPC" so he can debug the bug #5085. Things are much better with PEAR 1.4.x, because dependencies were so hard to manage with PEAR 1.3.x
Ironically, File_Archive even has an indirect dependency on Archive_Tar due to requiring PEAR for the PEAR_Error class. There are also indirect deps on Net_Socket and Auth_SASL because of features included that have nothing to do with extracting and creating archives.
Source PEAR-Dev
