One more idea for the mix (perhaps more as inspiration than actual use, since it's fairly specialized to one platform): the 'vrdeb' system that the Agenda VR3 (a linux PDA) uses. (details at http://agendawiki.com/cgi-bin/aw.pl?VrdebHome)
It's a patch-the-debian-distro method which leverages existing debian/ files, but adds a 'romfiles' file to the debian dir that lists which files from the 'make install' output should be installed to the rom image. The entire output of 'make install' is installed to the dev enviroment (where space is presumably not a problem) allowing libs and docs and such to exist where they'll be useful without taking up space on the actual embedded image. This seems like the best compromise to me - power of debian, but extended a bit. Perhaps someday even standardized into the main debian distro. Which is also, I think, a worth long-term goal for emdebian to have. --pj
