Raspbian should build the debian-installer package

It would definitely be nice to actually see the patches.

IMO if this is going to be an official part of raspbian, then it needs to handle partitioning and firmware/kernel setup. I would also want to see a commitment to maintain it on an ongoing basis.

Suggesting a partitioning scheme is easy to do, and could be done by just modifying one file. Similarly, installing a kernel is fairly straightforward I think with the flash-kernel package. That already has a debian installer udeb.

The difficult bit is deciding on the partitioning scheme to use. I would be very much against continuing the vfat /boot partition. The rpi firmware partition should be mounted at something like /boot/firmware (which is what Ubuntu uses).

https://github.com/Jc2k/flash-kernel
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=735092

Are there plans to make the pi a subarch in debian?

I recall that the vfat /boot partition is (was?) a requirement of the way the pi boots and reads the config.txt and kernel. This may have now changed?

I do find it useful to be able to edit the config.txt on machines that can't read ext linux file systems. I suspect this is case for quite a few people.

I guess that doesn't stop there being a raspberrypi raspbian built image with a vfat /boot, and a native rasbian built image without a /boot.

A fat partition is required, but it doesn't have to be mounted at /boot, and it doesn't need to contain kernels. It could have U-boot, grub2, or an efi bootloader on there for example.

IMO, if this is to be easily maintainable, then getting patches accepted into real debian is the way to go. All that then would be required is to use the raspbian keyring.

My preferred method is grub2 (no removing of sd cards!), but I understand that is too much for some people, and I'm not that bothered to argue for it.

Debian seems to be doing stuff through hooks in the raspi3-firmware package. They copy kernels to /boot/firmware this way and generate config.txt and cmdline.txt files through this mechanism. That's a bit rubbish if you want to change the defaults, plus you just end up with duplicate copies of all the kernels.

Also, if I'm reading this correctly https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/libdebian-installer.git/tree/src/system/subarch-arm-linux.c , the addition of new subarches in armhf is discouraged.

Somebody else has pointed out that the raspi3-firmware package is overwriting user configs - https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=848101 . They didn't fix the problem.

Example of how to automate the debian installer for the pi https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=216079&p=1328882#p1328882