I'm not certain how all this will resolve itself but I suspect it's likely to be something where The Amethyst Dragon makes a hak or haks which sit on top of an existing CEP 2.4a installation. If this is the case, it may not go far enough for some people who believe that CEP needs to be reforged or altered in some, more considerable, way.
This message is for those people and, hopefully, will allay some of the concerns they might have and also explain why I think a less-elaborate approach is probably going to be the easiest, most beneficial and have the highest chance of
actually getting done.
While he didn't have much of a forum presence and kept a relatively low profile, Acaos of Higher Ground joined CEP team sometime between 2.0 and 2.1. He set himself to the task of making CEP run as smoothy as possible and that involved almost single handedly going over the
entirety of CEP 2.0 content and searching for errors, primarily model compilation errors, and fixing them. This also extended to many other areas, like fixing PWKs/WOKs and a whole host of other things. Sometimes writing custom made programs or using existing programs, like OldMansBeard's CleanModels, to assist him in this process.
He was an exceptionally talented person, maybe the perfect person, for such a task. Anyone who's seen his work on HG, used NWN Explorer Reborn, used the model compiler/decompiler in it, Erf Tool Reborn (used for the CEP updater) or used any of his NWNX plugins would probably agree. The guy had mad skills
and the drive to carry tasks through to completion.
Now, people who interacted with a certain member or members of CEP might have come away with a rather dim view of them and made inferrences about the quality of of CEP based on those poor interactions. These inferences, while natural, could be very misleading. But behind the scenes, from CEP 2.1 to 2.3 (and a little beyond, IIRC), the actual CEP content was being expertly maintained, for the most part. While CEP 2.4/2.4a were released (to my knowledge) without Acaos's assitance, I have every indication that his prior work was not altered or reverted, but added to.
I was lucky enough to speak with Acaos about this on occasion and even inspect his build setup myself (he built new versions of CEP, from scratch,
on demand, using a mostly-automated process), which was more complex than any suggested in this thread so far, and involved SVN. By the time CEP 2.3 rolled out the doors, was it perfect? No. But, overall, it was in far better shape than most people would guess and pretty damned tight.
On a related note, sometimes why something is in CEP (like the duplicate textures Tiberius_Morguhn mentioned) can be a bit puzzling. I brought up almost that exact issue to Acaos and he explained that the reason they were not removed was because CEP did not want to inadvertently break content which might rely on those textures.
Anyway. I tend to agree with Pstemarie's comments about the likelihood that The Amethyst Dragon will wind up doing much of this himself. I think SVN was the right tool for Acaos based on his task (and the mammoth amount of content added from CEP 2.1->2.3) but I do not think it's necessary for the project at this stage in CEP's life.
If anything, I think it will get in the way of a workflow which Amethyst Dragon already has down quite well, which he uses to compile the monthly CCC.
It is possible for a thing to be overarchitcted to the point of failure. That should be avoided. CEP is a combination of a Swiss Army knife and the
Winchester House. Reverse-rearchitecting such a thing at this point is not the recipe for a good time, IMO.
