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.