Greg and I have been working on setting up an automated system for building eXist from SVN trunk and then making a Cocoon package. The script I've got is basically working (assuming the SVN checkout is not broken, which it sometimes is), but it does involve some patching of files which we've learned about by trial and error, and the Cocoon webapp that it builds doesn't seem to successfully start eXist up. This is a painful process, but if in the end we manage to make it work, we'll be able to file bug reports and patches that get into the trunk, making it much easier to build a Cocoon block version in future, and we'll also gain enough understanding of the process to debug future problem. If we can easily build a distro from the SVN trunk, we can be regularly testing our projects on future versions and preparing them for migration, which is going to be essential. Meanwhile, the old version stumbles along, requiring two or three restarts every day...