While this is in no doubt very useful, it (as you note) re-uses pre-built images that are unfortunately ancient (2013). The real jackpot still remains out ther

While this is in no doubt very useful, it (as you note) re-uses pre-built images that are unfortunately ancient (2013). The real jackpot still remains out there: a tool with which to actually create those images. Having that would be awesome. I use tool like vmdb2 to generate entirely new Debian VM images in under three minutes: I have more than a dozen images for my regular Debian development needs (various distributions, various specializations such as buildd-specific environments, etc.). However, unfortunately vmdb2 only supports i386 and amd64 so far. There are a ton of tools for automatically building Debian systems [1], some of which can generate bootable images, however they all seem to focus on i386/amd64. Fully Automated Installation (FAI) in combination with your gist could be something that works. FAI is used to generate most of the Debian images for the cloud providers. So most of the tooling should already be in place. If you get that to run, I can't say that you will make a lot of people happy, but you will definitely make a few people very very happy :-) [1] https://wiki.debian.org/SystemBuildTools https://wiki.debian.org/SystemBuildTools