[ZF] Re: [Zope3-dev] Official Zope packages

[Jeff Rush]

Christian Theune wrote:
> [Moving the discussion from zope3-dev at zope.org]
> 
> Am Mittwoch, den 25.07.2007, 10:05 -0400 schrieb Jim Fulton:
>> Some high-level comments.
> 
> I'm happy to support something with many packages, however, 200+ is just
> too much.
> 
> Maybe establishing some working groups that take care of sets of
> packages might be worthwhile. 
> 
> We could look at the existing packages and try to come up with some
> groups where people could say "Hey, I'm interested in this topic in
> general" and contribute.

The Gentoo Linux distribution has to deal with 10,000 packages and has evolved
mechanisms for such.  It might serve as a source of raw ideas, just to see how
they do it.

Their list of projects can be skimmed at:

  http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/index.xml?showlevel=2

The project most relevent to this conversation is the "herds" subproject of
the "metastructure" top project.

  http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/metastructure/herds/index.xml

For those not familiar with Gentoo, their ebuilds are like our eggs - bundles
of build stuff with metadata and dependency links.

As you can see on that page, they actually record their organizational people
structure in XML for presentation, searching and such.  Something like that
for PyPI might be useful, either extending the PyPI idea or masquerading as a
package you import and run to see the group inter-relationships.

Anyway, just some food for thought on this issue.  I'm sure there are other
projects we can learn from.

-Jeff