[Squeakfoundation]FreePAN: an opportunity to share repositories!

[Ned Konz]

Last night I attended (and spoke at) the Seattle Perl User's Group=20
meeting. Also in attendance were Brian Ingerson and Michael Schwern=20
of Portland.

Before the meeting, I had a chance to talk with Brian Ingerson (more=20
below). He's working on an interesting and relevant project.

<sidelight>
Though not the subject of the main talk, I soon found myself answering=20
questions about Squeak (and doing some promotion <g>). There were=20
several people in the crowd who were interested.

After the meeting, we went to a pub for a beer or two. There I=20
demonstrated Squeak to several interested people (note to self: get a=20
good demo together to show to programmers).

I think that with the right kind of introduction and modular system we=20
could convert a bunch of Perl programmers.
</sidelight>

Anyway, one of the interesting ideas that came from this was from=20
Brian.

He's working on an alternative to CPAN (the popular Perl=20
repository/mirror/registry system). I'll let him describe what he's=20
doing (I just sent him an invitation to join this list), but in=20
summary he's working on a repository/registry system with metadata.=20
Currently he's making it handle Perl and Ruby; there's some interest=20
in Python from Michael Schwern. Especially since we're also evolving=20
the SqueakMap system, it might be useful to talk with him about=20
joining SqueakMap with FreePAN in some way. This would provide a=20
single set of mirrored repositories covering all our languages, with=20
immediate exposure to the "scripting language" community.

And it sounds like some of G=F6ran's excellent work could be used with=20
FreePAN (or at least inform it).

Anyway, I thought I'd open this up to discussion, as it's a timely and=20
relevant issue for both our communities.

Ideas?
--=20
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE