Oops, sorry - I already created the directory. I will remove it.
My concern with attaching any kind of note to a package is that human nature says that people won't read it. What I expect will happen is that someone will see a package in contrib, say research-papers (or whatever it's called), get excited because that's exactly what they were looking for, and start working with it without looking for any readme or .info notes. How many of us bother to look at what is in the .info files now - last time I looked, most of them still had the old aD info in them.
So this person will start running into problems, and since they thought this would be mostly working they'll either spend a lot of time trying to make it work, or come to the forums asking for help. Either way, the situation has the potential to waste a lot of time and frustrate people.
I think that people will be more likely to notice the code's status if they get it from a directory that's clearly labeled. No guarantees, of course. :)
Personally, I have no problem with telling people to "cvs rm" the package from works-in-progress and add it fresh into contrib/packages when it's ready to go. You don't really lose the history, since the old files are all kept around for historical purposes, and starting with a clean slate when the thing is considered to be ready for contrib is not such a bad thing. I think I read some discussion recently about how this was the right way to move things without breaking checkouts?
It is true that someone would have to do this for users who don't have commit rights. I don't know how much of a burden this would end up being.
As far as the directory goes - I had created contrib/works-in-progress, and I assumed that everything would go there. I don't feel a need to mark packages vs non-packages - hopefully someone getting something from that directory will be clued in to look carefully at what they're getting.
IMHO this is a temporarly solution. Once we have a download repository we can accomplish the same thing there. The only reason I brought this up now is that Sloan is being asked to contribute code that I am uncomfortable putting directly into contrib. Presumably I'm not the only one who has this concern - meaning that there are other never-to-be-finished pieces of work out there that might get contributed if there was a way for people to do it.
