I really am looking forward to this feature (and the presentation). We're developing on Windows and deploying to Linux, and one of the issues of this cross-platform process is that AbtProgramStarter has very different behavior on Windows and Linux. So we need to do some testing and development on Linux for this exact reason.
This will be one of the most important features for us in since 8.6 together with 64 bits, SMTP/IMAP, PostgreSQL and many more of the great additions that you guys implemented for VAST.
Joachim