On broken wheels and user contributed code

Richard Hennessy wrote:
> I would like to have a forum of some kind for user contributed code,
> the list is not good for feedback. I have not received a single email
> of feedback on what I have been doing in my pw package.  That makes
> it hard to find any bugs when you are "on your own".
> 
> Rich

I should say that I think your PW package sounds like it's great based
on what you've posted and examples on your website, but I have not had
any occasion where a need to use piecewise functions has arisen. So the 
lurkers out here are not ignoring you entirely.

As a general suggestion, there have been some recent improvements to
version control systems which would provide a much cleaner and better
distributed version controlled contribution archive. I'm thinking for
example of "monotone" a version control system where each participant 
keeps a local database that can act in a disconnected manner, but can 
synchronize with other databases as changes are made.

If we set up a contributed maxima code archive, with a monotone database
being served from some computer system run by one of the contributed 
code developers, and maxima contributors synchronized with it, we could 
have a more flexible system for handling contributed code without 
needing to give a lot of secondary developers write access to a primary 
CVS archive for maxima.

Monotone went through a period several years ago where it was changing
rapidly, but recently has been very stable and speed issues have been
largely figured out. If I found a machine to host a monotone database 
would there be interest on the part of the contributed code developers 
in participating in that system?