FW: Library infrastructure

[Simon Marlow]

Some people have mentioned other systems that might be relevant: the BSD
ports tree, CPAN, etc.  I'd just like to clarify what (IMHO) we're not
aiming for here: in particular, we don't need a system that
=20
  - downloads source
  - manages dependencies (beyond what the compiler needs to know)

And I'd argue that we don't even need a system that builds binary
distributions.  The reason is that these tasks are all handled by the
various OS package systems: BSD ports, RPM, apt-get, emerge, and so on.
We don't want to duplicate or worse, bypass, the local package
management system.

We do need a system that helps you generate compliant package skeletons
in the local native format: an RPM spec, a BSD ports Makefile, or a
Gentoo ebuild.

Cheers,
	Simon