I can't see any negative points to keeping ext/skeleton in the tree.
I can't see any positive ones :)
It provides a basic template for making new extensions without having to go searching through PECL, this is a big + IMHO.
OK, fair enough. Is anyone going to answer the rather more important question of whether/when ext/pdo is going to be enabled by default? In 5_1 branch not having pdo enabled by default means Windows users can't have ext/sqlite by default either, and I think everyone else tends to forget this and assume all PHP versions have a database to hand. (Witness what Tony said with regard to filepro.)
- Steph