The phar archive that we install is just a zip file that someone created after using composer to bundle all of the symfony libraries: $ wget -q http://static.pdepend.org/php/latest/pdepend.phar $ php -r '$phar = new Phar("pdepend.phar"); $phar->extractTo("./");' $ ls vendor total 12K -rw-rw-rw- 1 mjo mjo 183 2016-01-29 17:41 autoload.php drwxr-xr-x 2 mjo mjo 4.0K 2016-01-29 17:41 composer drwxr-xr-x 6 mjo mjo 4.0K 2016-01-29 17:41 symfony
This is fixed in v2.3.2, and the old bundled versions have been dropped.