On Feb 22, 2005, at 12:37 PM, Roland Dowdeswell wrote:

> It also gets us out of all sorts of .so problems.

...and also gets us out of need-to-be-superuser types of problems.  And 
provides system-level caching of results.

Unfortunately, it also introduces a major run-time dependency.  
However, I don't consider that to be a huge problem.

-- thorpej