[development] progress control (like in update.php)?

Hi, Does anyone working on refactoring the update control out of the update.php script to be reusable in eg. install situations? Are other in need of this functionality? The autolocale module would need this to be able to safely run on a shared host, where it is not possible to set the time limit (and anyway,this is the only way to provide live feedback). As far as I see, any install profile with heavier processing needs would require such a progress feature, so abstracting this out for use by anyone would be nice. Gabor