> That's one of the reasons I don't see us not having a text/curses=20
> installer.

Ya know, a decade or so ago, SCO ...

   (don't hurt me, they occasionally did something cool, and this was one)

... started including in their distributions a tool they called Visual Tcl.
They had taken Tcl and developed an extension, much like Tk, but with just
a few simple widgets for lists and selections and basic stuff that could
be rendered equally decently in curses or X.  Then they migrated a bunch
of their sysadmin scripts to vtcl.  Run them on a bare terminal, you see
curses.  Run them under X, you see X.  Same scripts.

Assuming they didn't do something silly like patent the idea, it seems
pretty sensible to me, and could be done as easily in any extensible
scripting language (ksh comes to mind, but that's me).

-Chap