Re: Archive unification progress

[Peter Simons]

Tom Howard writes:

 > For someone new to the scene, would either of you be able
 > to summarize what the issues and current plans are.

The plans are to improve the usefulness of the archive by
more quality assurance; e.g. consistent macro names, no two
macros in the archive serving the same purpose, etc. We had
lots of wild ideas, and most of them are described here:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/ac-archive/policy.html

That document has been sitting there unmodified for
approximately 1.5 years. So you can probably guess what the
problem we're having right now is. ;-)

These changes aren't trivial to implement, storing meta-data
in XML rather than a jury-rigged plain text format should
have been one step in that direction. With that initiative
having failed, all bets are off.

My best guess would be to leave the infrastructure the way
it is right now. It's not pretty, but it has worked
successfully enough so far. ;-)

Peter