[horde] Install problems

[o1bigtenor]

Greetings

I have been working for a while trying to effect a horde webmail (hopefully
being able to later add things to also make it groupware stuff too)
install. It has been a long and more than somewhat arduous path. I am new
to installing and configuring complicated combinations of software and not
having any one document that gives all the steps (which then work) makes
things quite challenging.

I have gotten to the step where it says - - - -
$ pear install horde/webmail

and I'm looking forward to seeing something like the screen shots real soon
now.

What I get is about 60+ lines the last half of which say something like:

Could not download from https://pear.horde.org/get, . . .    .

which is troubling but the first half (lines that is) is (IMO) quite a bit
more interesting
horde/content requires PHP (version >= 5.3.0, version <=6.0.0alpha1, . . .
), installed version is 7.0.19-1                   - - - - so I did some
checking.
Php7.0 release date (AIUI) was some time in early October 2016 and, in
fact, php 7.1 was itself released just a few months later (December 2016).

This is very interesting because in using the command above (pear install)
I find that there are 46 horde packages that just can't work with php7.0 .
Looking a little further there is some suggestion that with horde_webmail
5.3 (not 5.2 the currently available) one will be able to use php7.0.

So what should I be looking at doing:

1. forget about using horde_webmail
2. hope that the release of version 5.3 happens in the next ??????
(week/month/year)
3. find some way to get php7.0 and php(5.6 IIRC) to coexist and install php
(5.6)
4. some other solution

ideas and suggestions requested - -- please.

TIA

Dee