Hi,
A very good initiative! I will certainly use it in my scheme-osa project.
Do you envision setting some sort of Snow Patrol to assure consistency, portability and quality of the Snow packages? Is there any grand library design concept in Snowfort, or is it intended to be just a loose system of individual packages?
I have no idea how the self-control of package authors work in practice in other repositories of this sort. But I wonder how Egg or PlaneT deal with duplication of effort (for example, 10 HTTP oriented packages, rather than one or two), or proliferation of low quality "hello world" entries.
Jan
P.S. To illustrate why I wonder about the latter I point to a great democratic initiative for publishing scientific papers -- arxiv, the repository of e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology, http://arxiv.org/.
The idea is great and the arxiv archive has served us well for many years. However, there are some problems with this repository, as David Bacon, the owner of Quantum Pontiff blog (http://dabacon.org/pontiff/?p=1418), explains:
"... while the arxiv is a amazing tool, one of the problems was that the volume of papers was high and, to put it bluntly, the quality of these papers was not necessarily so great."
Consequently, he established the scirate.com site to rate the papers (initially quant-phys), in order to filter out the noise. More details in the article I cited, which is sort of FAQ on subject of rating, presented rather humorously.