Thanks someone at opennet for bringing my attention to this:
http://www.opennet.ru/openforum/vsluhforumID3/100066.html#50

0.6.3 has introduced some changes that were deemed incompatible
with t6/p6 branches; it should be possible to restore compatibility
at least for non-EFI images but the effort required hasn't been
up for grabs so far.

See also https://bugzilla.altlinux.org/30474

The problem with initial implementation (commit 62e7e9c1)
is that there's no systemd-services package in p7/branch
thus apt complains about an attempt to remove something
that doesn't even exist in the first place.

Aimed at live images at first but should cover installers as well.

This has been brewing for quite some time and while the proper
implementation is considerably more complex (and hard to do)
looks like there's demand for the particular important use case,
namely LiveCDs for Russian users, so this code has been shared
with a few people before merge.

There's a particular problem with lazy evaluation
in case of BOOT_LANG: mkimage uses internal variable,
BOOT_LANG = $(GLOBAL_BOOT_LANG) (note the lack of
immediate assignment there), and if we set up

  export GLOBAL_BOOT_LANG = $(BOOT_LANG)

in the same namespace we end up with recursively
defined pair of variables; a ":=" in either place
would save the day _but_ it's not there in m-p due to
accumulator variables, e.g. USERS, which are defined
and exported by a corresponding feature and then get
populated *after* having been declared for export,
_and_ it's not in mkimage as of 0.2.16 for some reason
that might even be good (I don't know yet).

- current updates

It has evaded sisyphus before but not anymore.

See also https://github.com/lxde/lxde-qt/issues/302

...yet another one...

This has been asked for by lewellyn@freenode, why not.

NB: distro/.regular-sysv doesn't include use/net-eth/dhcp
    (as it looks like asking for) since there's still hope
    to get NM cooperating with sysvinit again.

Looks like there are more fonts out there than just croscore!

- minor tweaks

Both locale and keyboard have been set up already,
no use to waste time on those (which results in 'us'
keyboard layout missing out totally, ironically).

Thanks aris@ for the tip.

...basically giving it a chance to go with Secure Boot undisabled
which is a feature these days, unfortunately...

installer-feature-cpufreq-stage3 has been deleted from sisyphus.

This one adds write intent bitmaps for MD RAID;
see also #14877.

It's been asked for already, let's not wait for December:
http://www.opennet.ru/openforum/vsluhforumID3/99418.html#48

It's been obsoleted by lxqt-config in 0.8.0.

Those URW fonts are scarey by today's standards :-(
Unfortunately these are pulled in by seamonkey & co...

- pkglist updates

This package holds a nice collection of unofficial utilities
to deal with OpenVZ containers.

There are quite a few potentially useful packages
implementing FUSE based (userspace) filesystems,
these are typically lightweight and still might be
helpful to someone stuck with our rescue image...

This one lurked under my radar so far as well.

ALT Linux LiveCD/Rescue images use AUFS currently,
some tools to access unionfs might be useful.

Wonder how it managed to evade this list before...

xfdashboard is a GNOME Shell-like window switching interface
and application runner; xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin is another
(KDE-like) menu search facility; thanks sem@ for suggestions.

It's a pretty solid PDF viewer;
pcmanfm-qt integration to be sorted out later.

Just for the fun of it!

- (sysv)init: exclude systemd explicitly

It's not as bare as it should be due to interactivesystem
being slightly more than it ought to.

The issue at hand is that interactivesystem pulls in
network-config-subsystem and that one has several providers
by now, systemd-networkd being one of them since recently
(and pulling in systemd).

Just the same problem as with systemd-journal; both might be
fixed by reworking mkimage to allow for different package name
resolution modes:

- "slap everything together and resolve with one-shot"
  to handle conflictless situations (most of those);
- "process multiple transactions to allow for conflicts"
  thus making it possible to include e.g. a few MTAs into
  the provided package base.

Ensure that systemd is outside by explicitly telling so
in the pkglist.

...and factored out common gtk subtarget removing qt
(it's not exactly helpful to drop a library your browser
is based on in qupzilla case).

This one isn't in menus even but is quite nice for semi-kiosks
it seems; well worth further attention, and let it lurk around
just in case.

E19 would ask the user if they want to shut down
when facing power button event; it won't get a chance
though as the system will hurl down immediately as per
acpid-events-power package provided configuration.