In effect, what you want is CPAN, or CTAN (well, you probably want more but
that concept is practical and works :-)). Especially CPAN (the Comprehensive
Perl Archive Network) could (should) be a source of inspiration, if only to
combat the idea that we're a bunch of NIH syndrome sufferers.

For people who don't know CPAN, I can type a single command line and (possibly
after asking some initial questions, like geographical location) the software
will fetch packages, dependencies, build and install everything (not just Perl
code, but related files as well). There's a central CPAN site where developers
can obtain their own spot to publish packages, and - I think - there's a team
of volunteers and scripts that indexes stuff so you can browse and search. 

CPAN is, IMO, the single biggest reason that Perl is still more popular than
Python. And from what I've heard about SCAN, it is heavily inspired from it
(does it support mirroring?), so it's probably a good place to start.

Les Tyrrell <tyrrell at canis.uiuc.edu> said:
>I would argue _slightly_ against what you are proposing here.  I do agree that 
>as far as the user is concerned, they should not be presented with a bewildering 
>variety of places to go looking for bits and pieces of code.  However, I would 
>not want that to mean that there is literally only a single repository in 
>existence- at least not in the sense of one server, sitting on one machine, for 
>the entire planet.
>
>HOWEVER.  I *DO* want it to feel like that is the case, in the sense that the 
>user is presented the illusion of having rapid, unified access to everything 
>ever written for Squeak ( or any other Smalltalk ) on the entire planet, sitting 
>on their hard drive.
>

-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg at cdegroot.com>
GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B
Building software is like quantum mechanics: you can predict what it
will do, or when it will be ready -- but not both.