Hi Erik,

This is a request for a new project with the name "CDR".

CDR stands for "Common Lisp Document Repository". The Common Lisp Document Repository is a repository of documents that are of interest to the Common Lisp community. The most important property of a CDR document is that it will never change: if you refer to it, you can be sure that your reference will always refer to exactly the same document.

There have been a number of attempts to establish a standardization process for Common Lisp after it has been officially published as an ANSI standard. The ANSI standardization was very costly and very time consuming (according to http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/ msg/15248a1b11c5a603 it took nearly 10 years and at least $400K).

The goal of the Common Lisp Document Repository is to be more light- weight and more efficient. We focus on one aspect of standardization: the ability to refer to a specification document in an unambiguous way.

The Common Lisp Document Repository intentionally does not define a process for coming up with specifications or any other means to guarantee some level of quality of the submitted documents. Instead, we aim for a community-driven, decentralized approach to come up, discuss and finalize specifications. In this sense, we only provide the services of librarians.

We hope that the Common Lisp Document Repository has the potential to prove useful in establishing new de-facto standards, and to serve as a stepping stone for more formal standardizations in the long run.

For more details, see the draft website at http://p-cos.net/lisp/cdr/

This project is carried out by Marc Battyani, Pascal Costanza, Arthur Lemmens and Edi Weitz. Since the project doesn't produce any code of its own, there is no license attached to it. However, we state requirements for document licenses as part of the CDR submission process - see point 2 at http://p-cos.net/lisp/cdr/manual.html

I already have a home directory at common-lisp.net, but find my public key attached anyway.

On behalf of the CDR editors, Pascal