ok, so, apologies for not responding for 2 days: the latest cold, which is back again a fourth time in as many weeks, is leaving me exhausted. again.
tzafrir: i've mentioned this a number of times, and am happy to mention it again, as you appear to have missed it. the key difference is massive scope-creep. look at how the NSA developed libselinux1 and associated infrastructure. they got a university involved to develop the FLASK model. they set out a design strategy, they set out what they were going to do, then they did it. whilst almost everything else that the NSA does may be questionable, steven smalley is clearly a smart guy and knows what he's doing.
by contrast the development of systemd has become a critical single-point of failure for a massive number of distros, where its developers are clearly and pathologically not taking responsibility for the consequences of their *technically-driven* decisions, and are continuing to develop their software without wider consultation.
so, i read what everyone wrote: i think the simplest thing to do is to just go with the image that i have been working with and testing over the past two years. it's using xfce4 (gnome is too heavy). i know it works, and i simply don't have the time - or importantly the energy - to create a new image, *especially* based on people's comments and reactions that they'd be deeply unhappy with it not being a "stock image", even if all i did was make it boot sysvinit instead by default. those comments *alone* immediately terminate all and any possibility that i can provide debian/jessie in a 100% ethical way.
on receipt of the cards, anybody who wants to will be free and entirely at liberty to do "apt-get dist-upgrade" and they will be taking direct responsibility for doing so. for those people who are technically-minded they are also entirely free and at liberty to set up a from-scratch root filesystem.
this is a decision that is easily justifiable based on the fact that it's going to have to be distributed with the sunxi 3.4 kernel as that's the only one which supports the full hardware.
l.