Hi Andy,
I wanted to let you see the mechanism I used to construct the image packages that we're using on the DPM OSA. The build mech is pretty embedded in the tree, so rather than try give you a set of files I setup an account on a build server so that you could look at the whole tree.

The creds are asharp/asharp on a server names kaan.

You home dir is the root of the build tree.

Locations of interest are:

Images/Install/packages/dpm-bm/debian
This is where a complete installable image is built using "dpkg-buildpackage -b". Again, the resultant package is not an installable deb, rather it's the entire rootfs as a payload in a .deb.

Images/Install/packages/common/debian
These are the maintainer scripts that are common to all image packages. Currently the only one we've tested all the way through is the dpm-bm (bare-metal) image. This is a non-Xen variant. The dirs are there under packages/... for all the VM's we plan to build.

Literal/osa-cfg/usr/local/bin/osa-install.py
This is the installer. It takes the .debs built above and unpacks them onto a partition on the other bootset.

It helps to know that the lvm layout we have is:
  LV        VG     Attr   LSize   Origin Snap%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
  common    system -wi-ao 389.29G
  dom0-swap system -wi-ao 952.00M
  dom0_0    system -wi-ao   4.66G
  dom0_1    system -wi-a-   4.66G
  dpm-swap  system -wi-a- 952.00M
  dpm_0     system -wi-a-   4.66G
  dpm_1     system -wi-a-   4.66G
  svm_0     system -wi-a-  27.94G
  svm_1     system -wi-a-  27.95G

Yeah, look at those sizes and weep :-)
Sorry, our last platform was flash based. I'm happy this one isn't.

OS/Debian
This is where the pbuilder config lives. This defines the packages that are pulled into the default tree.

There's no place yet for the accompanying Xen config bits. I'll be adding those in the next month or so as we're transitioning to Xen as the primary dev platform.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of this, or just want to chat about installer options in general.

-Bruce