+++ Steve Langasek [2011-03-11 09:52 -0800]:
On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 11:20:35AM +0000, Dave Martin wrote:
debootstrap will balk at trying to install a system with no dpkg installed, because dpkg is an essential package. And indeed, various packages will fail to configure properly if dpkg is absent - I don't know if any of the packages in the current nano seed are affected, but no sense borrowing trouble. If we want the package manager out, we should do this with postprocessing.
multistrap can be run with 'omitrequired' in the config in which case it really will only put in what you asked for and the stated dependencies of those packages, as resolved by apt. This is excellent foot-shooting territory, but it does allow the making of smaller rootfses, which is one of the things it was designed for (small, cross-architecture rootfses, using apt and dpkg for resolving and installing). It's probably a better tool for making nano images than debootstrap, which has a more conventional focus. Certainly worth looking into.
Wookey