Module development and code questions

Well...

I am sure that everyone knows that during the life of the web-site the database becomes somewhat distorted. Created and deleted nodes, modules make indexes in the tables going in a funny sequence like 2, 3, 5, 15, 17, 18, 24... indead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6...
We can just forget about this issue, but probably there are another fans of accuracy like me and probably someone have some script or module to bring the database to the ideal order. To compress the numbering sequences, changing all refered foreign keys as well and auto_increment values.

I've been using the scheduler module. I was wondering how things would work out if I had posted content via the scheduler and then added more content regularly. Does it end up where the "authored on" date says it is? What I mean is, if I post something, say it should happen two days from now, then post more stuff with the current date, will it show up as posted before the regular posts?

I think alot more people than myself could use a module install and uninstall wizard. I believe this wouldn't be too complicated to implement, so I suggest we get started. I've given it a little bit of though, and here some of them are in text format.

I believe a good way to go about is to make an installwizard module. It would be nice to be able to turn it on and of as there might be som security issues involved.

Many may consider it a problem to upload files into the modules directory. I believe a good solution to this is to connect to the ftp-server of your site in the script. Some of the ftp details should be configured and stored, username and password should be provided on every install to minimize security risks (please comment on the security, I'm not to sure about it). This way people could download the module package, and upload that in the administrator section of their drupal site.

Every installable module should implement an install hook, and possibly an uninstall hook. These could benefit from helper functions in the installwizard, such as installwizard_execute_db_file().

The wizard should show several screens depending on the module. Users could be given the oppertunity to configure new permissions, menuitems and module specific options defined in the module itself in the install process. The wizard could call parts of the drupal core to accomplish this.

There should be an easy solution to this, but it escapes me.

I'm trying to use the 4.5 module propstar.module (which has apparently ceased development) with 4.6 RC (downloaded and running 4/12).

Problem is, on output, the module's return value:

<a href="/?q=propstar/rate/10/1" title="Rate this node 1 star."><img src="/modules/propstar/star.gif" alt="Rate this node 1 star." /><;/a>

Is being processed and returned as follow:

When uploading an image, by default no albums are selected. If the user leaves it that way, the image doesn't show up anywhere. Is this correct operation, or am I misunderstanding something here?

I've been working on creating a module wrapper for qdig (http://qdig.sourceforge.net). It's built to be used as an included script, but when I call it from my module, all of it's global variables are null. In standalone mode it works fine, so I suspect that there is something interesting about the way globals work in an included script that I haven't been able to figure out.