FreePAN: an opportunity to share repositories!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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