At Bryght we have been using distributions (nee install profiles) for a while now.<br><br>One of the things we found very necessary was to alter the defaults provided by the install profile, <br>instead of just setting the variables during the initial install.
<br><br>A lot of the time, we found it nicer to have programmatic defaults (ie: it defaults to the site name provided<br>in the hosting database), but also it fixes the issue whereby hitting the 'reset to defaults' button resets
<br>to the drupal defaults, not the defaults provided by the install profile.<br><br>The patch for this is here : <a href="http://drupal.org/node/25745">http://drupal.org/node/25745</a><br><br>This also introduces the loading of a profiles/$profile/$profile.inc file, which I feel is very important
<br>for the install profile to be able to add code into the running distribution.<br><br>I think we should also considering using a 'distribution' namespace, and inserting the 'distribution' into<br>the module_list. This would allow distributions to do things like providing custom _help hooks, and a
<br>couple of other things.<br><br>