The issue actually hit image.in/Makefile: "metadata" target
in features.in/metadata/lib/50-metadata.mk wasn't reached
even if features.in/build-distro/lib/90-build-distro.mk
would ACK that the "whatever" actions included "metadata";
thus Metadata/pkg-groups.tar wasn't created and the installer
silently failed to install the .base system.

Let's armour the rest of the cases where the order of inclusion
might be important as well.

hsh-initroot leaves the chroot's root directory permissions
as 1775 while these should really be 755 at most; let's fix it
(important for both VE and VM images, useful for rescue/livecd
ones as well -- especially those with an installer onboard).

An initial draft of it was done half a year ago but several tricky
thingies had kept the code from showing up as it was rather brittle
and incomplete.

This implementation involves quite a few changes all over the place
but finally works good enough for live and installer images.

Please pay attention to the versions of these packages:
- installer-feature-setup-plymouth (0.3.2-alt1+)
- branding-altlinux-sisyphus (20110706-alt2+ if used)
- plymouth (0.8.3-alt20.git20110406+)

See also:
- http://www.altlinux.org/Branding
- http://www.altlinux.org/Plymouth

Whoops, forgot to feed placeholders for git to grok
the empty directories that are needed later...

From now on, subprofiles can include the lib/*.mk
brought in by features just like image.in/ long did.

livecd-install support wasn't added properly;
fixed (thanks glebfm@ yet again).

Something like fine-grained KEEP_* might be due...

The early version considered ISO and KOI encoding families
as obsolete; the current one is a bit more wise and knows
these are just /rare/.  Thanks glebfm@ for #27168 research
and cinnamon by slava@ for ISO-related noises at startup.

There were STAGE1_PACKAGES_REGEXP and MAIN_PACKAGES_REGEXP
but adding more of those was postponed to avoid bloat and
bitrot; THE_PACKAGES_REGEXP is needed for use/firmware now
and looks like BASE_PACKAGES_REGEXP and LIVE_PACKAGES_REGEXP
will be useful before too long either.

Docs updated to include stage-specific package related vatiables.

sub.in/stage2/image-scripts.d/99cleanup-boot,
livecd-install need /boot files too

This kind of test was proposed by led@ to gather statistics
on chroot's contents going to become squashfs (the script
optimizations lowering added overhead from ~10 sec down
to a subsecond range were also proposed by him).

Intentionally not documented in doc/variables.txt due to
the rather lowlevel nature of the probe (at least so far).

The knobs involved are SQUASHFS (the additional effort kicks
in only for "tight" case) and GLOBAL_SQUASHFS_SORT (must be
non-empty for this extra overhead to occur).

Additional experimentation is needed to find out whether
the difference in squashfs size and performance is worth
the trouble (seems the impact is non-zero but pretty minor).

There's much reason for reuse instead of duplication
among the different stage2-based subprofiles.

In particular, the rather monolithic driver cleanup script
of the ancient is better done in several clear pieces with
the final depmod run.

Scripts dropping apt/rpm databases will dump pkglist first.

A script purging /boot/* will honour live-install if present.

Minor inno^Wfixups all over the map too.

As too many things started duplicating between distros proper
and (e.g. corresponding) LiveCDs, it became apparent that a class
of entities which end up working for THE_USER (not a sysadmin,
and not a developer, just a Linux user) is in need.

So THE_KMODULES will power installed basesystem and live image,
while THE_PACKAGES, THE_LISTS and THE_GROUPS will participate
in building those.

- toplevel README received some long-needed refactoring
  + lowlevel detail moved, well, to lowlevel READMEs
- reflected more thoroughly that m-p is not about distros anymore
- dropped features.in/00example/README.en: it's already out-of-date
  a bit, and there's no perceived need in thorough English docs so far
- wiki article got split into parts and somewhat rewritten, links updated
- mv doc/{CodingStyle,style.txt}

If you make distro/live-builder.iso, the result is an image
containing almost everything (short of actual full enough
repository) to rebuild itself.  It will attempt to configure
eth0 with DHCP and reach http://ftp.altlinux.org for packages.

RAM requirements start with 2Gb, self-build is accomplished
on a 4Gb host with "make CLEAN=1 distro/live-builder.iso".

Packages required for "make distro/syslinux.iso" get included.

(some due fixups all over the place too)

Employed double colon targets to eliminate
  warning: ignoring old commands for target `debug'

This is quite a large-scale change since mkimage-profiles got used to
baking distributions over the last year, and virtual environments are
quite different, so e.g. image.in/Makefile had to be split in two with
the main part of it moved into features.in/iso/lib/.

Short overview:

- features.in/Makefile: lib/ support
  (supporting VE images requires dynamic modifications
  to image.in/Makefile before starting the build;
  the most natural way to achieve that seems to use
  features mechanism along with makefile include dir)

- packaging format related part moved into features.in/pack
  (should be better prepared for diversity either)
- features.in/iso renamed to features.in/build-distro
- features.in/ve  renamed to features.in/build-ve
  + NB: these could not be merged as e.g. features.in/build
    due to completely different script hooks

- lib/image.mk renamed to lib/build.mk
- image, config, log postprocessing moved downstream
- added a sort of a topping in the form of lib/sugar.mk
- assorted style fixups (like ifeq usage)

- clean.mk: reliability fix (the problem was observed by Oleg Ivanov
  and me too but finally it did get the attention quantum)

- reviewed, updated and extended docs
  + QUICKSTART: should be[come] a step-by-step guide
    (thanks Leo-sp50 for prodiving feedback)

This is a sort of anti-feature which removes and not builds;
still with mkimage-profiles' approach we can at least build
up the removal procedures as well.

It's what triggered the tagged scripts, BTW.

It was clear that "common" isn't very apt for packages that
will get *everywhere*, and became apparent when the need for
a "base+live packages" variable arrived with powerbutton feature.

So:
- the former COMMON_PACKAGES are now SYSTEM_PACKAGES;
- COMMON_PACKAGES act as "BASE+LIVE_PACKAGES".

Note that SYSTEM_PACKAGES also got factored out from stage2 based
features into stage2 subprofile itself; cleanups were due as well.

Rather minor fixups for things changed in the meanwhile and not
yet (re)documented properly; and a change for memtest feature
to require syslinux feature (the code's been changed to fit
the updated description, actually, and the change is purely
formal as no syslinux alternative is being used/planned so far).

It's still very immature -- base lists should be really base,
and functionality should be sorted out in more consistent way.
So far moved to tagged lists (which need some more experimentation
anyways to get both lists and their use more elegant).

- fixed live.iso (now actually useful):
  + extra cleanup was being done (coming from install2 case)
  + root user was password blocked
  + there was no unprivileged user (added "altlinux" w/o password)
  + added xdm setup hook for future X-based livecd flavours
  + several picks for a less slim "base" list
  + xdm login
- tweaked rescue.iso (added ext3grep)

- introduced generic stage2 subprofile (non-standalone)
- ported installer and rescue over to stage2/{install2,rescue}
- initial stage2/live (needs more work for sure)
- use make-initrd-propagator
- updated and somewhat extended doc/

NB: mind #26133, #26134