Hi everyone, with the new addition of AIF I decided to start listening to this mailing list and am finding some of the discussion very interesting even if some of the technical bits are a little over my head. The text file installation idea sounds particularly interesting and I also like the idea of having bash helper scripts or even some kind of ncurses interface to help generate the text files. This would make installation much more smooth for a lot of users and make making custom installs very easy(being able to hit enter and come back when the job is done is awesome). If things were done well, hundreds of linux distros might even dry up overnight as people realized rather than making a million distros more or less from scratch or hacking away at other distros, everyone can work on a common framework for easily creating specilized installs with specific application profiles. I think It may be a good idea to throw up some of the AIF documentation on the arch wiki and provide details useful to those less experienced with coding. If people come to realize how silly much of the distro ecology is right now, efforts may be shifted away from spending lots of effort to create slight variations on others' work and toward things such as upstream development and improvement of framworks like AIF. Instead of a web site existing which someone goes to to find out what the right distro is for him ( e.g.http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/ ), he would run a script (or web interface thing) or ncurses app on an install disk and it would create the right distro for him. -David Campbell