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[Mike Hearn]

> Thanks for the plug ;-)

Don't get me wrong, I find the project fascinating, and am following its
progress closely :)

> Yep. This is the interface you get automatically with zero install, except
> that rather than showing the icon shaded until it's downloaded, you can
> run it at any time and you get a progress bar if it needs to be fetched.

Indeed. I suspect that whatever system is used behind the scenes, the UI
users interact with will end up basically the same.

> The nice thing about the whole system (from a computer scientist's point
> of view ;-) is that the conceptual model (running stuff from the net) is
> very simple, and the rest is just optimisations (caching / garbage
> collection).

Yeah, the simplicity is one of the coolest things about it. Very little
needed from the developer.

> But of couse, it's very new and needs lots more testing and refining
> (although I'm running XFree86 4.3 through it quite nicely at the moment).
> It would also benefit from better binary compatibility between distros,
> although that's probably a good thing anyway.

Right. In fact, it seems we're solving quite a few of the same problems
- I saw you've already encountered glibc fun, well, that's only one of
many interesting and delightful problems we have to deal with in terms
of binary portability. I think I'll email you off list about this (along
with some more questions), it might be worth pooling efforts on some
things, even when the approaches taken are quite different in many
respects.