Agreed. Most development groups should be building a local collection of utilities that contains all of these snippets, and most importantly, some documentation

Agreed. Most development groups should be building a local collection of utilities that contains all of these snippets, and most importantly, some documentation of what they do and some unit tests to demonstrate that they are correct. No need to have global dependencies on small snippets that really should be in a core library anyway. C has libc, Java and C# have the creator's (Oracle or Microsoft) standard set of libraries, Python has the "batteries included" stuff in all the different distros. And so on. All of these snippets rightly belong elsewhere, not in packages. And even if you did get them added to the right libraries, I guarantee you that you will not get rid of the need for a collection of small, and somewhat random, in-house functions, classes and libraries.