Hi Michael,
I must admit I'd been focused on the solution I'd already started working on before looking at your work, so re-packaging probably isn't necessary.
The main reasons for doing it were:
- I'd like to massage the plugin standard to require composer.json files, and thought repackaging to include them would be a good way of bootstrapping change. Certainly creating patches for the plugins that include repo metadata is on my wish-list - I'm always a little hesitant to rely on externally generated metadata for a project, as synchronisation strikes me as a point of failure.
- I'd like the vendor/... directories to have a common structure. That said, with my latest approach to building the Moodle directory, it probably becomes more about aesthetics than achitecture, as instead of symlinks from the docroot to vendor/... I'm moving directories and symlinking vendor/... to locations under docroot. The use case that inspired this for suites where the zip starts from docroot and has sub-plugins in the appropriate locations - MediaCore did this, as do Kaltura.
Will hopefully push some updated code this weekend, as this is a spare-time/on-brand project rather than client-funded.
Phil