Great comments from Sonja, and since Planet SUSE is one of the ways to communicate, I'll offer thoughts here...

Do we need only one distribution, or maybe three trees I can see the benefit in multiple trees, I thought I'd blogged about this before, but can't find it, so probably not. I would see there being two permanent trees:

• Development
  This is essentially UNSTABLE, and where the bleeding edge work happens. In CVS terms, think of it as HEAD. Anything goes here, within the framework of agreement by the maintainers of the various components.
• Release
  This is as STABLE as we can get it, it's essentially whatever the last release was plus updates (of course there's also the support for previous releases, but that's a lower priority). No API/ABI changes allowed here, same policy applies as current SUSE update policy basically.

Then, there'd be a third tree that would come in as and when required:

• Beta
  You guessed it. This is the roughly equivalent to the current beta programme, represents a fork from Development, exists for the beta test period, and then becomes the next iteration of Release

As for who can contribute I've said before that there are some people (myself, Pascal, Richard B, the PackMan crew for example) who are respected and trusted in the community who would be an obvious first tier of community-based package maintainers. Thoughts?

Well, CD5 had just finished installing when I went to bed last night, did the minimal configuration required this morning, and I have to say this is one niiiice distro. Really, my only gripe is still bug #113524, but I've now uploaded YaST logs for it, which will hopefully help. It's not insurmountable (no pun intended) though, copy /etc/cryptotab from your previous install onto a removable disc of some kind (I stuck mine on my USB drive) and then copy it back into place post-install, then simply reboot and you will be prompted as normal for the passphrase (or to avoid rebooting, run /etc/init.d/boot.crypto start - have fun guys.