"At this stage I do not want to commit the DCCA to using the official Debian kernel-image debs"NOT A FORK.
Ian, why not drop this "We will not fork Debian" crap? You're not going to be identical to Debian. It would be *insane* for you to be identical to Debian. Various packages that Debian ships are not suited to the market that you're aiming at supporting. "Fork" is not a dirty word - it's something that's happened repeatedly throughout the free software world. I'm not complaining about anything that you're doing or the manner in which you're doing it, merely the plainly dishonest claim that this isn't a fork.
(For those who have some difficulty with this argument: a fork is when a bifurcation occurs that separates something into two brances or parts. Taking the Debian kernel source and applying different patches to it results in it being a separate branch - the point at which they split is a fork. It's possible that "fork" means something different in whichever language you speak, and I'm entirely happy to admit that the only one that I speak with any degree of fluency is English. If it turns out that I'm horribly mistaken and the DCC website is written in Flemish or something, then I'll happily retract my accusations of it being quite horribly misleading)