Kevin wrote:

I've seen a few Products that people have put together here and posted on their own websites. I think it would be good to take the contrib area on the Zope site seriously, so that it will grow into a repository as useful as CPAN.

Believe me, we are taking this particular area *very, very* seriously. This is part of the mandate for Ken Manheimer who starts on Monday. Ken's work operating python.org kept him firmly and painfully rooted in the problem of organizing the Python universe. Also, Ken and I are both librarians at heart :^) Michel Pelletier, of Trove/ZTrove fame, works here now and he has a lot of ideas from Trove. I had a lot of background in the mis-begotten Locator-SIG that I ran but failed at. The Package Archive support that we build into zope.org is going to be absolutely awesome. It is part of the larger "Zopespot" project, in that packages will have some relationship to authors (and thus the membership system), to bug reports (thus the Collector), and the sitewide catalog.

To get things going in that direction requires the cooperation of everyone. If DC can keep the contrib area organized as the number of Products increases, and if people make sure they submit their Products to the site, we'll have the beginnings of CZAN :)

Yes, there will be more than enough for all of us to do. Step one when Ken gets here will be to organize the requirements and manage the way the community reaches conclusion. Agreeing on standards for packages is very hard as there are so many: IAFA standards, RPM metadata, Trove, Dublin Core, etc. --Paul Paul Everitt Digital Creations paul@digicool.com 540.371.6909