Building and distributing ZeroPhone SD card images

[CRImier]

As of now, the ZeroPhone SD card image build process is as follows:

1. A fresh Raspbian Lite image is downloaded from here
2. It's uploaded onto a 2GB microSD card, the FS is expanded
3. esp8089 driver, power management script and ZPUI are installed manually, /boot/config.txt additions and raspi-config operations are applied by this manual
4. The resulting SD card is tested with a ZeroPhone
5. SDCardDeploy script is ran, dumping an image from the SD card, zipping it up, creating a torrent file and a Wiki description
6. Torrent file is uploaded to ZeroPhone Wiki, generated description is added to the Downloads page

Steps 1, 2 and 3 could be automated - they require a lot of manual work. For that, we need a way to build our own SD card images automatically - reusing the Raspbian repositories as much as possible, not requiring any kind of powerful&expensive hardware (ideally, it could be built on a x86/amd64 machine, or on a Raspberry Pi 3 if running Raspberry Pi-compiled binaries or compiling for Raspberry Pi is necessary/preferred).

What are our requirements for the image building process?

• Installing a bunch of packages from apt-get and local .deb files
• Running ZPUI and power management install scripts (until they're both packaged; see below)
• Emulating the changes that we'd typically make with raspi-config
• Adding lines to /boot/config.txt

What might be needed so that image building is more straightforward?

• Packaging ZeroPhone power management (here)
• Creating virtual packages for everything ZeroPhone needs (here)
• Packaging ZPUI - tracked here
• Packaging the power management script

What's needed in general:

• Research existing solutions for image building, find the one that conforms to our requirements as much as possible

Useful links - existing solutions and related materials:

• Custom NOOBS build instructions
• CustomPiOS, and an example for it
• Matrix Creator-related repositories, we might get packaging/usage examples from some of these
• Everything you wanted to know about Raspberry Pi (RPI) images ( part 2 )