Don,
I am merely trying to contribute to the pot. There is nothing revolutionary about what I'm saying, only a combination of existing ideas that others (including yourself) have brought up.
I am not questioning any intentions of yours or anyone else's. In fact I mention clearly that there's been talk of doing this, just not much action because we're all (justifiably) worried that splitting things up will make life vastly more complicated for users and to some extent developers. The amount of work you've put into OpenACS - especially v4.x - is enormous, and I wouldn't dare question that. I'm not criticizing anyone for the current situation, only stating how it is and trying to help things out a bit.
I'm also not trying to rehash any old discussion, although certainly I hope that a solution like this one will simplify future discussions and maybe even help prevent confusions.
This is a proposal for discussion. It takes empirical evidence into account: to date, we've only added to the core, never taken away. Packages like acs-workflow which get little use are still installed by default. Packages like content repository which may not be necessary in certain installations are still installed by default. Packages like new-portal are being considered for addition to the core as required elements when this may not be in everybody's interest.
This stuff needs discussion! Forget intentions, forget hopes, let's talk action. Is this useful? How so? How can it be tweaked to be more useful?
