I must have missed the memo about fragmentation being bad. However, if the Android folks really do want to zip the stack up (from the kernel to UI) all the way

I must have missed the memo about fragmentation being bad. However, if the Android folks really do want to zip the stack up (from the kernel to UI) all the way to a common interface, for example, they are going to have to start with the kernel in a way carriers seem unlikely to get behind - namely getting bleeding edge drivers into the mainline tree in a coordinated way that would make desktop ARM distributions on phones much more likely. If not, separate houses will just go on keeping their forks alive and maintaining their increasingly separate interfaces, since the forks start lower. At the moment, that doesn't seem to be what is meant by fixing fragmentation however. IMHO, the Android UI should just be a packaged environment like Unity or Gnome or KDE. It seems unlikely that we'll see a Debian package for Android any time soon though, but that would be a move in the right direction.