Yet another [cross] installer

[Hector Oron <zumbi@debian.org>]

Hello,

  Nowadays, the number of devices (non x86) is growing and growing.
Lots of these devices have not upstream linux kernel support, which
makes it a bit harder to maintain in the context of debian-installer.
Also, afaict, debian-installer team does not like to add complexity to
d-i, which I understand, so it has better maintainability in the
future.

  Also live-installer could be the path to track for such kind of
devices, but again, live-installer was not meant for such purposes and
I believe maintainer won't be happy to add such extra features.

  Ubuntu people has been working on a nice tool (evolution from
build_arm_rootfs) named 'rootstock' which basically prepares a
filesystem for ARM targets.

  I have N armel devices, some mipsel ones and powerpc, most of them
are not mainlined supported, but a third party supports it. I would
like to work on a tool which can handle all my devices and it is
scalable to support other people devices, either using native or
cross; with MTD, SD, USB support; with and without using qemu magic;
with official debian repositories and non-official ones (SH, avr32,
uClibc targets, ...)

  I have started a couple wiki pages for porting PS3 and EfikaMX
(still WIP) boards to Debian in a "hackish" way. I would also like to
add balloonboard support among others.

  I would like to have some feedback from the community to see which
it is best way forward *in a Debian way of doing things* or
suggestions and thoughts. So the question would be:

  Which is best way forward, in your opinion, for supporting non-x86
arches installations (even installation done from a x86 platform)?
(debian-installer, live-installer, rootstock or start from scratch)

Kind regards,
-- 
 Héctor Orón