Bringing Mobian closer to Debian, again

[Arnaud Ferraris <arnaud.ferraris@collabora.com>]

Hi,

A few months have passed, and we're making some progress on this topic, 
so here's a summary what happened lately:

* 'mobian-tweaks'[1] has been dramatically stripped down: it now only
  contains a few config fragments and PAM configs; the next step for us
  is to propose those bits for integration in Debian's
  'mobile-tweaks'[2]

[1] https://gitlab.com/mobian1/mobian-tweaks
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/mobile-tweaks

* we're in the process of upstreaming our patches to 'u-boot-menu': part
  of those have been submitted (but not yet accepted), others are being
  rewoked before being sent; as those are replacing some of our
  device-specific tweaks, once accepted this will allow us to merge most
  (if not all) of those tweaks in Debian's 'mobile-tweaks', further
  reducing the delta

* we created a few new packages we believe will be useful additions to
  Debian, and plan to migrate those to the DebianOnMobile salsa group
  first, then have them uploaded to Debian if no one objects:
  - 'mobile-initramfs-tools'[3] is a collection of initramfs hooks and
    scripts for improving the "mobile device" use case:
    + automatically resize the root fs (including LUKS-encrypted
      partitions) on first boot
    + allow overriding the "root=" and "ro/rw" kernel command-line
      parameters (useful for some Android devices on which the stock
      bootloader appends such parameters to the chosen cmdline)
  - 'mobile-usb-networking'[4] provides scripts and the corresponding
    systemd services to create a network connection over USB gadget
  - 'miniramfs'[5] works around the limitation of some devices for which
    the initramfs size is constrained; it creates a minimal initramfs
    able to chain-load the actual initrd from the boot partition and
    transfer control to it

[3] https://gitlab.com/mobian1/mobile-initramfs-tools
[4] https://gitlab.com/mobian1/mobile-usb-networking
[5] https://gitlab.com/mobian1/miniramfs

Finally, I'm doing a major rework of the 'mobile-tweaks' package: 
currently this package generates one (very small) binary package for 
each supported device, with very little difference between those.

As it might not be the most efficient approach (especially when the list 
of supported devices grows over time), I started refactoring this 
package based on the concepts proposed by Federico a few months ago:

* make it a single binary package with the config files and fragments
  for all supported devices
* include an executable and per-device configs: upon installation, the
  executable will run, detect the device type and install the necessary
  files under `/etc` (or create symlinks to the original files if more
  appropriate)
* for Android devices, it will extract firmware files from the vendor
  partitions and copy them to `/lib/firmware`, so we don't have to care
  about distributing those anymore

I expect to have an initial version ready for review during next month, 
in the meantime I would welcome your opinions and suggestions about this.

Cheers,
Arnaud