Hi Ed,
as I already mentioned in some previous emails, I'd be personally in favor or simply getting rid of SimRel and just evolve EPP to provide both the packages and the necessary artifacts for these packages to work.
My reasons to support that is that:
* Marketplace would still be available -> no loss for users
* packages would still be available -> no loss for users
* installer would still be available -? no loss for users
* SimRel and its strange governance and all the discussions that have emerged with it disappear -> time saved
* EPP starts handing everything, and EPP governance is working well -> EDP used efficiently.
* Active contributors like you stop spending effort on projects that are not worth it (to you): many projects are in SimRel just by the force of habit, but the value for the user community is arguable and the cost for maintainers is present (more things to check, more bugs to open, more files to watch, longer build time....).
With this proposal, the maintenance cost would be drastically reduced and the process be made more streamlined with typical EDP. Hopefully this will become simple enough for the few active contributors on SimRel (build & infra, not contributions) and EPP to be able to cope with this for some years.
About enforcing or checking SimRel rules, then they are not really SimRel rules and checking that or declaring compatibility should be handled by projects, as part of their releases; not by a downstream consumption.
To summarize, making SimRel become a "pull" project like EPP and not a "push" project like it is now is IMO the best path to keep the community able to ship good quality end-users oriented IDE artifacts
Cheers,
