Some people have mentioned other systems that might be relevant: the BSD ports tree, CPAN, etc. I'd just like to clarify what (IMHO) we're not aiming for here: in particular, we don't need a system that - downloads source - manages dependencies (beyond what the compiler needs to know) And I'd argue that we don't even need a system that builds binary distributions. The reason is that these tasks are all handled by the various OS package systems: BSD ports, RPM, apt-get, emerge, and so on. We don't want to duplicate or worse, bypass, the local package management system. We do need a system that helps you generate compliant package skeletons in the local native format: an RPM spec, a BSD ports Makefile, or a Gentoo ebuild. Cheers, Simon