Ken,

My solution right now looks a little bit different. My robots run Ubuntu
9.04. On a separate Ubuntu 9.04 system I installed ros-cturtle-base and
then used

http://svn.openrobotino.org/trunk/ros/strip_cturtle.sh

to copy only the needed files into a new folder and generate a new
debian package. By this I reduced the size to 866MB and even more
important my deb package only depends on the really necessary packages
which are

python-yaml
libboost
liblog4cxx
libyaml

The same I did for my own ROS stacks.

What we would need is the whole ROS split up and separate runtime packages.