Newbie "make release" question - Rolling a customized release

[Michael Graziano]

Hey all, I'm trying to eliminate a headache and I'm hoping you guys  
can aim me in the right direction -

I'm trying to roll a custom FreeBSD release - nothing fancy, just a  
stock 7-STABLE plus a few ports & some stuff under /usr/local - and  
I'm a bit confused as to the best way to go about building the release  
distributions/CDs with my custom changes.


I *think* what I would like to do is customize the universe that gets  
built under the chroot directory and roll a release from that, but I'm  
not sure how I go about getting make release (or the mk script?) to  
pick up my changes when it re-rolls the base tarball.

I thought this would be as simple as making my changes inside the  
chroot, deleting {chroot}/usr/obj/usr/src/release/release.[2-8] and  
running the mk script from inside the chroot, but my results were less  
than spectacular (the mk script blew up :)


Any pointers would be much appreciated - I'd love to get away from my  
12-year-old collection of builder shell scripts and not have to baby- 
sit complies/package installations anymore.  Collected pointers and  
(hopefully) successful results to be turned into a howto for future  
clueless dingbats like myself if such a thing doesn't already exist :)

Thanks,


-MG

(PS - I know I can do what I want by rolling a local package with my  
changes, but I was hoping for a trained-monkey fire and forget kind of  
installation :)