Why Trove?

The `classical' model of Internet software archive (exemplified by Sunsite, WWW frosting on an FTP cake) is no longer adequate to the increasing size and evolutionary speed of the open-source community. It eats too much maintainer time; the classification/search mechanisms are woefully weak; and the package namespace has no collision detection.

One of us (Eric Raymond) had been Sunsite's principal maintainer for more than a year before Trove got started. Eric wrote the keeper tool, which does about as good a job as possible of automating away the scutwork under the present system. It's not good enough. The amount of maintainer time Sunsite requires is rising to the point where the archive is not sustainable. On present trends, Eric thinks Sunsite's system (or its maintainers) will collapse by the end of 1998.

Some prominent Python people (including Ken Manheimer, Andrew Kuchling, and Guido Van Rossum) had realized for a while they were facing similar problems in the future of the Python archive, and begun discussing a redesign they thought of as the `locator' project.

The concept of the Trove project was originally floated by Eric Raymond in early April 1998. Within a week, he was approached by Guido van Rossum about joining forces. By the end of April, when the project and these web pages were officially launched, principals included Ken Manheimer and Andrew Kuchling of the Python Software Activity. Ken Manheimer proposed the name `Trove'. John Cowan provided valuable expertise in database design and IR pragmatics.

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$Date: 1998/05/11 23:26:55 $

Eric S. Raymond