While I do see that these programs have similarities from the UX point of view, they techically work on different principles.. Both of these projects have already working packages and they can co-exist without conflicts. There is very little to be gained from merging, and I am against merging projects just for the sake of it (The traditional unix way is to "have a program do one thing and do it well").

But as the programs are under GPL you are of course free to combine these under your own project as you see fit... alternatively, providing a patch to accomplish this could give you a whole new edge in this discussion as it would save us the work that might feel unnecessary