Today I've stumbled upon two pieces of software that I've been hoping to see for some time.

repoze.component

Sort of like zope.component, but simplified to the bare minimum. No formal interfaces (strings are good enough), no global component registry, and no magic in sight. You still need to wrap your head around the whole idea of component lookup – some real-world examples would help – but that's inherent in the problem.

repoze.configuration

Eerily similar to a wishful-thinking mockup that I made two weeks ago, asking a question on the WSGI mailing list. At a basic level, it's a glorified declarative-syntax function-calling mechanism that configures the application environment. Which is great, because you can follow the logic of how each piece of the application is assembled.

Most importantly, repoze.component and repoze.configuration are simple (unlike Zope), so they would be a great fit for Django, Pylons and other Python infrastructure to adopt as a lingua franca configuration system. But perhaps that really is wishful thinking.