The stage3 networkless install, which is what I usually do, is very similar. The main difference is that the second chroot-time script doesn't emerge anything that isn't on the package CD. And how do I get the scripts in there in the first place? Well, on a machine that's totally built from scratch, wiping the hard drives clean, I do a stage3 install and bring them in either from a floppy or a CD or a USB stick, depending on what's available. On any other machine, I usually have a partition that doesn't get changed -- /home, or on a dual-boot-with-Windows box, a shared FAT32 partition.
So ... rather than put vim in the stage1 tarball, would there be room in the compressed filesystem on the minimal LiveCD for two bash scripts, which the stage1 installer (human) could edit to suit? They'd be a nice "mini-handbook" for the stage1 install process if nothing else. If there isn't room, you could put them on the release website, which a stage1 install needs to get to anyhow.
<old-timer-speak>
You young sprouts have it easy. When *I* got into computing, bootstrapping consisted of a half-hour of keying in a binary paper tape loader into low memory of a machine with a 60 kbyte hard drive and about 5 kbytes of RAM. And when you were done, the OS consisted of an assembler that used hexadecimal op codes and a subroutine library.
</old-timer-speak>
Why don't we mark this "fixed in 2005.1" and move on? :)
For getting the size of the stage1 down, how about getting rid of the editor entirely?
vim/nano are on the LiveCD.
The only stage1 item that an editor is needed for (according the install document) is to edit make.conf, which can easily be done from the LiveCD environment.
It could simply be move to be in stage3's only (brought in by emerge system).
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