Hello Thomas, lists, First: I think it is a good idea to provide such mechanism out-of-the-box
A few months ago another approach was presented on the live-build project: for computers that are able to boot with EFI (secure or not), preparing a live USB-stick (based on the ISO file) is nearly trivial [1]. It is called FST (File System Transposition) [2].
It requires a FAT32 formatted USB stick on which the whole (including the hidden .disk folder) content of the ISO file is copied. There is no need for magic boot sectors, update-grub or similar. (On Windows the tool Rufus can do all this for you). Since the files are now on a regular FAT32 partition, they can be modified as required.
As far as I understood, the installer images already support this, and for the live images this is on the TODO list [3].
And yet another approach which was shown to me on the openSUSE conference 2022: with kiwi it is possible to build live images for Debian as well, and IIRC one of boot steps involves filling the remainder of the USB-stick with a writeable partition. I can look up further details, if you are interested.
With kind regards, Roland Clobus [1] https://salsa.debian.org/live-team/live-build/-/merge_requests/323 [2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2022-06/msg00024.html [3] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianLive/TODO
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