In the context of some twisty open-source projects that have rather screwed-up Makefile and library environments, I said to Mike Wilson:
By the way, all this bizarre project design is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve with my BuildSystem thing at home. What an idea: Sane lib/app directory design, built so that multiple developers can work on the same system with organic deployment of libraries as code is generalized enough to merit it. The agony I just got thinking about how some projects are done completely remotely...over CVS... :-[ Perhaps the same system applies, though. If I'm doing development remotely, I still probably want to create a local auto-build so I stay up-to-date with the repository, and also work in a protected development sandbox with a stable snapshot of the code. It's an interesting idea. Doing all this "polling" of a CVS tree starts to remind me of the Wiki Effect. Something like having a RecentChanges page, that people are looking at all the time.
This still regenerates the hub+satellites configuration, where all the satellites periodically sync up with the hub, but have their own value-add they perform independently. What is particularly interesting is the evidence that the satellites must have a "model" of the hub locally, which is then pushed into the hub and the other satellites "learn" what the updates are. So it is like a "shared world" model, just with a slow synchronization cycle. See Patterns.Bio.BeeHive for more context and discussion on this.