I am rewriting supermin to make it more robust. In particular, instead of storing the list of host files to be copied into the appliance (which is not robust if the host package is updated and new files are added), it now stores the list of packages, and works out the dependencies and full list of files by looking at the current package database (eg. rpm database). This patch is not complete, but it has reached a milestone where it is both able to build a supermin appliance in the new format, and construct a chroot full appliance. You can try it out like this: (1) Build a supermin appliance (in /tmp/supermin.d): ./src/supermin -v --prepare zlib bash coreutils kernel -o /tmp/supermin.d (2) Build a chroot full appliance: mkdir /tmp/chroot ./src/supermin -v --build --format chroot -o /tmp/chroot /tmp/supermin.d (Note that the old 'supermin-helper' program has been combined with the main tool. They are now just two different modes of the supermin tool: --prepare vs --build). There is a lot still to do. Rich.