Frank Mittelbach wrote:

>  > 
>  > On the counter discussion, you'll see (in xnotes2bib) I've stuck with
>  > the low-level variant but needing to make it available to the user.  I
>  > hope this is the right idea.
> 
> what we really need to do is to provide a user level interface for that, that
> then can be reused at package level for offering user accessible counters

I see I meant to say:

but *without* needing to ...

which make more sense!  Something for the use level would be nice,
though.  I was not sure if \newcounter is intended to stay in any case
(I guess lots of the documentated LaTeX commands for package authors,
such as \PackageWarning, will fall in the "to be retained" class).
-- 
Joseph Wright