Michael Banck wonders about the Ubuntu development model. Two things I can provide constructive answers to are:

• NMUs: no, we don't have maintainership as such. However, we do have unofficial areas -- for example, myself and Fabio take care of X, I do most of the stuff relating to ppp and also discover1 (including the data list), et al. Doing pppoe without a PPPoE setup has been interesting, but oh well.
• Debian: for most all of us, Debian was an after-work thing anyway (or, at least, a small part of work). Nothing's changed here; the only thing that's changed for me is that I haven't gotten around to setting up a chroot yet (only got DSL bumped up to unlimited recently), so I don't have a Debian machine to build on: I get all my uploads sponsored right now.

... in which our hero performs an install without a CD-ROM drive, seeded almost entirely from /var/cache/apt/archives.

I last installed my desktop ages ago, and since then I've dist-upgraded almost every package that's installed. Installing my X40 has been fun: our bandwidth is incredibly limited by transfer, so instead of grabbing an ISO (not like it has a CD-ROM drive anyway), I decided to attempt a netboot install from /var/cache/apt/archives.

First, I set up apt-move to move /var/cache/apt/archives to a mirror directory, and to mirror something replicating the standard Ubuntu archive. Secondly, I set up dhcpd3 to netboot the contents of pxeboot.tar.gz (found on http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/warty/main/daily-installer-i386), to the trusty laptop.

Now, here comes the fun. Once this was done, I needed to wget the main/debian-installer/binary-i386 Packages{,.gz,.bz2} file, and manually drop the sums/sizes into the Release file, which needed to be altered to specify the right component/suite. Once this file was there, a small for script got every single udeb specified in the d-i Packages file, and dropped it into the pool structure. Once all these things were satisfied, I was on my way to a netboot install, with minimal bandwidth consumed; thanks to Colin Watson for patiently putting up with my stupid questions.