I'm concerned about the state of the zc.buildout template recipes. I want one. I want some one-off files, specific to a certain project, for which writing a standalone recipe feels very heavy. Here are the template recipes I found: collective.recipe.template (Wichert Akkerman) iw.recipe.template (Ingeniweb) inquant.recipe.textfile (Stefan Eletzhofer) z3c.recipe.template (Uli Fouquet) buildout_script (Nathan Yergler) z3c.recipe.filetemplate (Philipp von Weitershausen) First, on the basis of this list, it strikes me that a lot of people want this functionality. Putting template support into zc.buildout itself would be nice. I envision some APIs (like the ones in easy_install.py that zc.recipe.egg uses) that other recipes could use easily. I would even want recipes like the zc.recipe.egg script recipe to allow specifying initialization code by identifying a template (i.e., ``initialization_template = buildout_templates/foo``, which would parse the given template and insert the code the same way the ``initialization`` parameter works). Second, there's no clear winner at the moment. I happened to find z3c.recipe.template, buildout_script, and z3c.recipe.filetemplate first. On the basis of those three, and the comments that z3c.recipe.template made about collective.recipe.template, iw.recipe.template, and inquant.recipe.textfile, I decided to settle on z3c.recipe.template to be the package to which I would contribute. It has tests, a variable substitution approach that seems to work well with buildout, and recent development activity. However, on starting to hack on its documentation to sketch the changes I wanted, I gradually realized that this was a fork of collective.recipe.template. Since collective.recipe.template is listed as BSD in setup.py (though I saw no explicit licensing otherwise), placing z3c.recipe.template in the zope.org ZPL-only repository is problematic. Since I don't find the prospect of creating yet another template recipe attractive, and Philipp's z3c.recipe.filetemplate looks like it can take my new features while maintaining backwards compatibility, I'll try that next, I suppose. But meanwhile, I'm concerned about the state of z3c.recipe.template. IMO, Uli and Wichert should try to reconcile the licensing and forking issues (with Uli taking the lead in those discussions, ideally, since he is the one who forked). z3c.recipe.template should be removed from the zope.org repository, unless/until the licensing story is cleaned up. And maybe we can start to settle on a common template approach soon. This should be a problem that is solved for buildout canonically, IMO. I'll be happy to try and see if my features are generally interesting, once I make them. (Note: I could write about this on the distutils list but I'm not already subscribed there, and I suspect I have a better chance of catching some authors of the pertinent recipes over here, and some of this is about the zope.org repo.) Gary