Possibility of accepting a network-based installer of Ubuntu as an official flavor?

[Aaron Rainbolt]

Note, I'm asking this *very* early. I don't have the project I have in 
mind even started yet. I'm not even sure what I want to name this 
project. This is more of a "testing the waters" to see if this kind of 
thing is even a possibility before getting started.

I've seen more than one person annoyed by the fact that the mini.iso 
netinstaller is no more. It was never officially supported anyway, but 
apparently people got use out of it, so it seems like something that 
would be handy if it still existed. I'm sure we're not going to start 
producing it again, so I got the idea of making something that could act 
somewhat similar to it. I asked people about this idea on Mastodon and 
the response seemed fairly positive.

My idea is to either write my own installer or use a customized version 
of the existing Debian installer, and package it into a "flavor" of its 
own, which would be capable of installing any supported version of any 
official flavor of Ubuntu. The "flavor" would be able to be held in a 
very small ISO file (preferably CD sized), and it would download and 
install all of the packages that make up the Ubuntu system at runtime. 
This would allow a user to install Ubuntu or any desired flavor thereof 
using a single installation medium, rather than having to flash an ISO 
every time they want to make a drive install a different flavor. The new 
installation would be entirely up-to-date from the get-go, and it would 
enable the use of existing small storage media for those users who don't 
have sufficiently sized optical discs or flash drives.

I would eventually aim to make this into an official flavor of Ubuntu, 
however it would differ from all existing flavors in several significant 
ways:

* It would be the first flavor that could not be installed onto a target 
system by itself.
* It would be the first flavor that could install other flavors onto a 
target system by design.
* It would be the first flavor that could install versions of Ubuntu 
other than the one it is based on.
* It would have a different installer than any existing flavor of Ubuntu 
most likely, and would not be able to make use of existing official 
installers in any meaningful way without large changes to one of them.

Because of these differences, I'm not sure if such a project could ever 
become an official flavor, and I may end up simply maintaining it as an 
unofficial installer by myself should I end up doing it.

Is this kind of project a possible candidate for becoming an official 
Ubuntu Flavor, or is this enough info to declare it as not a possible 
candidate?

Thanks for your time.

-- 
Aaron Rainbolt
Lubuntu Developer
https://github.com/ArrayBolt3
https://launchpad.net/~arraybolt3
@arraybolt3:lubuntu.me on Matrix, arraybolt3 on irc.libera.chat

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