This means that `pear` and `pecl` will be available for PHP 7.4+, but *will be removed* in PHP 8+ (see https://externals.io/message/103977 for upstream discussion around this deprecation).
I tested the 8+ changes to this script by creating a few fake "8.0" bits in the script itself (fake `possibles` version, etc) and verified that the result is as expected.