and I understand that the OACS leadership is appropriately concerned with having too many duplicated, similar packages.
Well ... my personal opinion is that we don't want a bunch of duplicated, similar packages "officially supported" by the OpenACS project. I personally don't see any reason to discourage people from writing what their heart desires. On the other hand I doubt the community wants to encourage the proliferation of similar packages as long as there are a bunch of things that are missing entirely still in OpenACS 4.x. Fill in the missing holes rather than repeatedly polish the same stone ...
There's going to be a lot of talk about this and related topics when we get into planning 4.7. Public talk.
Whatever is decided in terms of how we might support distribution of packages that aren't part of the "official family" I can't imagine that there won't be some level of support. Something like Ben's proposed MIST tool, something minimal like a repository for user contributed packages at openacs.org, something we've not thought of yet ... whatever it might be, it will be *something*. We want to encourage folks to write packages and to make them visible and available to users, whether or not they make it into the "officially supported" suite of packages.
