Users often have to write installation programs. These programs must locate and identify Oracle installations (so that they can create the application's schemas).

You have already written code which does the very same thing, and it is more robust than anything your customers are likely to write. These are very valuable facilities. It would increase the value of DOA if this code was formalized and documented so that we could use it, too.

For example, we could give the user a choice of which Oracle Home to install into, or a choice of networking DLLs to use, without his (our) having to know their names or how to locate them.

This is useful when trying to resolve installation problems. For example, if the default DLL doesn't work, we'd want to locate other DLLs that might work. DOA already has that know-how, and it would be very useful to tap into it.