Just a few general comments.. first of all efficiency is a very important
argument. Go read the comparisons I did between several OSs, and see,
for example, hat Linux kicks our ass all over the place (and I didn't
even include the 2.4 kernel in the benchmarking yet). Efficiency
has been neglected in he past, and we should be paying more attention
to it.

Secondly, what often happens is that someone makes the effort to
improve a piece of code, posts about it here, gets buried with
emails on how it isn't perfect, should do X, Y, and oh, while it's
at it, Z too. This is often followed by a discouraged developer,
who decides to drop things altogether, and we're still stuck
with the old code.

Sure, in an ideal world we would come up with the most generic
and architecturally sound solution. But in a perfect world
we would also have the manpower to actually do that.

Given our resources, we should really learn to be happy
with an improvement over the current situation, even if it isn't
"perfect".

In this partcular case, it's a huge improvement, the code is
pretty clean and pretty much totally seperate, so it's not 
standing in the way of future developments, and does not
clobber a lot of code. So unless someone can come up with
something that is even better in a matter of weeks, it's
perfectly reasonable to go for it. Not that it shouldn't
be reviewed of course (some good comments and suggestions have been
made).

- Frank