Module development and code questions

I've been putting together a site in drupal and have run in to the need to have structured contests. At first I thought that I could just create a forum and each topic could be a contest, but doing it that way is way to loose - I need to be able to set restrictions and other rules. I come from a Perl background and look forward to writing some PHP for the fun of it. So, here's what I would like to have, any comments are welcome...

hello drupal world,

a quick idea/suggestion from a newbie...

I was wondering about adding a "purchasing group" option to product.module (not only, but let's start easy).

Writing "purchasing group " i mean :

a. the possibility of buy a pdt/service together with a group of person that share the same commercial interest in it
b. the possibility to offer pdt/servicex to gruops, indicating the min/max number of orders wanted and other functions.

I actually did something like this in the portal i manage (wich will be soon migrated to Drupal), and i think it has a great "viral power" for web communities; on the same time it colud be a great tool to help people (expecially who really need it) getting a good or service at reduced price (as scale economy suggest).

It would be great for me to contribute to Drupal starting on this subject (in Italy we use to say: "late is better then never").

Unfortunately, as a dummy user, i cannot be very usefull alone with my "machine", nevertheless i'm sure some of my skills could be useful to contribute to the goal.
I'm discovering Drupal since few weeks, so please be patient if this feature already exist or if my suggestion could sound "not clear"; in the next (hoping) few weeks i'll be a bit more skilled about Drupal and probably i could do more to support the idea.

If anyone is interested, please give advice!

Regards,

I had my copyright module properly tagged in drupal's CVS and the release had been automatically created. Then I made an update to the tagged version. After waiting a couple of days I noticed the tar.gz file linked on the project page hadn't been updated. I assumed it would automatically update within 24 hours if a file in that branch was updated. So I went to "Add New Release" and deleted that release, assuming it would be recreated within 24 hours. That was over a week ago and the 4.5 release still hasn't reappeared for my project. Any ideas?

A simple question for which someone can hopefully supply an easy answer:

If I've downloaded the latest taxonomy_access module from CVS (which was updated 18 hours ago) do I still want to apply the patch (which was updated 5 weeks ago)?

I've been running around trying to figure out how to make different Windows diff programs work, but I'm not really sure that I even need to do this.

Thanks in advanced for your replies.

Is there a module or method by which Drupal can assign "credit" to users based on

Please see here for the issue that I reopened... I'm not sure, but it would appear that the 'issues' aren't viewed as frequently as forum nodes on Drupal.org, which is why I'm posting a link to the issue at hand here.

Thanks,

James Addison
http://www.pjsoft.ca