Descot: Distributed Code Repository Framework

Programming language communities often have repositories of code to which the community submits libraries and from which libraries are downloaded and installed. In communities where many implementations of the language exist, or where the community uses a number of language varieties, many such repositories can exist, each with their own toolset to access them. These diverse communities often have trouble collaborating accross implementation boundaries, because existing tools have not addressed inter-repository communication. Descot enables this collaboration, making it possible to collaborate without forcing large social change within the community. Descot is a metalanguage for describing libraries and a set of protocols for repositories to communicate and share information. This paper discusses the benefits of a public interface for library repositories and details the library metalanguage, the server protocol, and a server API for convenient implementation of Descotcompatible servers.