I think one way to look at this is to examine similar ideas for other systems that work well. The FreeBSD ports tree is very successful in bringing in a diverse set of libraries and programs. Dependencies and builds are pretty much handled automagically through some (rather complicated) Makefiles. They have also provided a fairly nice web interface for browsing and searching the ports tree. Contributions and updates are handled through CVS. Conceivably, this could handle issues like building and installing libraries for each installed compiler, and eliminate the need to distribute binaries. I think that building and including libraries has to be standardized across the different compilers. One big benefit of using unix is that the C suite is basically consistent across platforms. Other random thoughts... I think that in addition to the Report and Tutorial, a Best Practices document needs to be developed. This would outline the preferable naming conventions, indentation, make targets, and also recommend the use of tools like Haddock of HDoc for generating consistent documentation. I am willing to use my DSP library as a guinea pig for any ideas (it is still a little immature, though), and to help out where I can. -- Matthew Donadio (m.p.donadio@ieee.org)