deployment

Hello all,
Sorry for cross-posting; but I think people working on different aspects of Drupal may have interest in this idea.

I've submitted a SoC 2007 Drupal proposal on automating the whole process of creating a complete Drupal site with a LAMP stack in a self-contained virtual machine image. A formatted PDF version is here:
http://www.abeharry.info/SoC2007_DrupalAST_FullProposal.pdf
Here is the abstract:

The Drupal automated staging toolkit is a proposed set of code libraries, file schemas and parsers, and code generators, for