PHP pear.php.net is using a unsupported protocol – This should never happen.

What an annoying and useless error. Here’s how to fix it, but there isn’t much to it.

You get the error when running this command.

$ pecl upgrade
pear.php.net is using a unsupported protocol - This should never happen.
upgrade failed

The fix? First upgrade the pear channels, then the pecl channels.

$ pear update-channels
$ pecl update-channels

Next, do a pear and pecl upgrade.

$ pear upgrade
... 
(may update a lot of pear packages)

$ pecl upgrade
Nothing to upgrade

It’s not clear to me why this is even an issue in the first place, but it apparently is.