We're still in a bit of turmoil, as you know for the start of the thread, the 'original' shepherd was just a (slightly messy) bunch of scripts. A lot has changed since then - as you might have heard, I created a Qt-base core, and now that Shepherd will be a GSoC project there is a good change for rapid progress. I am now in the phase of moving the core to gitorious/extensively documenting so more people could join in and then we can really start kicking. The PR1.2 story threw a wrench in the works, but the good news is the availability Qt SDK and QtMobility, which I intent to take full advantage of (the ability to simulate the various HW sensors and their states really really helps a lot with testing plugins).