excellent point about a notes repository... one downside is that these repositories seem to proliferate, i find myself going through your site, jon's, collaboraid's, jun's, openacs docs... hopefully, one day we can merge them into docs for the main site :).
my notes on point 2) are somewhat incorrect: the -extend switch has nothing to do with multirow mapping, it allows to extend the multirow with extra columns... but some kind of db_multirow statement is necessary when using the list-builder, at least something like this:
db_multirow LIST_MULTIROW_NAME XQL_FILE_QUERY NAME {}
thanks for the noquote pointers. i am thinking about switching to development in 5.0 so i won't have to do porting later