I think that Benjamin has an excellent point here.
As much as I curse CPAN on a regular basis (e.g. for forcing 5.8.0 on 
me), I wouldn't even touch Perl or Perl based apps if it wasn't for 
CPAN and the easiness that it brings for the installation of apps and 
libraries that have non-trivial requirements.

I'd say that the discussions on licences are a waste of time; I think I 
can predict that with more than 40 OSI approved  licenses around and 
more non-OSI licenses available, there will never be a strong majority 
to agree for a specific license for a hypothetical extended OCaml 
library.

What could be done is exactly what Benjamin suggests. To some extent, 
the hump has a few of these functonalities. I'd push for "standard 
installation procedures" as being part of the minimum.

My $0.02...
--f
François Rouaix

> The minimal functionality that seems needed is something like this:
>    - a single repository (on somebody's web server, or maybe 
> SourceForge)
>      where stuff lives
>    - an easy way for authors to upload stuff to the repository (and to
>      re-upload new versions of their stuff)
>    - an easy way for users to browse and download stuff
>    - some way (at least informal) to indicate dependencies between one
>      thing and another in the repository
>
> Of course, much more functionality could be imagined and wished for
> (e.g., a machine-readable representation of dependencies, provisions 
> for
> mutiple versions, standard installation procedures, documentation
> standards, etc., etc.), but all that can be added later, in light of
> experience.  For now, let's let a thousand flowers bloom... and just
> encourage them to bloom in the same garden!
>
>     - Benjamin
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