Matthew,
Thanks for your feedback and your very valid points. The most important response I can provide is that I think MIST is an idea that will become vastly more important as time goes on.
Today, there's a bunch of packages in OpenACS and in dotLRN. That's just two big chunks. But as other projects take off (dotWRK, dotORG, etc...), there's going to be more and more conflicts as to what code should be downloaded to make something work. As Don and Dan have pointed out, it's everyone's goal to split things up into individual packages soon. That will make the development job more flexible, but the installation job more difficult.
MIST is meant as a patch to make the installation part easier and more flexible to different user needs.
And if you want to still see a monolithic distribution, that's fine, too. I'm only trying to add options here, not take any away.
Finally, since you mention Linux distros, remember that there are many. RedHat, Debian, SuSe, Mandrake, etc... That's *exactly* the idea I'm pushing here. I'm saying that the OpenACS architecture is like the Linux kernel, the packages are like the many pieces of software on top of the kernel, and we, OpenACS.org, are not RedHat or Debian or Mandrake. We are Linus, and we want to *enable* the presence of RedHats, Debians, and Mandrakes.
(and yes, as someone who took high school German, I should have remembered about the name... ah well, certainly a better name is probably a good thing :).
