tinypoodle: I'd say you are correct WRT to the remastering of the initrd. Unfortunately the term of remastering seems to get used in two different situations, which would benefit from being more carefully distinguished from each other:
- (A) Remastering of the initrd (i.e. 'tinycore.gz' or 'microcore.gz'): This gzip-ed cpio-archive contains the Core system that gets loaded into RAM at boot time. This wiki page is describing that process (plus a bit "more").
- (B) Remastering of the ISO image: This referes to the creation of a (bootable) CD-ROM image that contains: a boot loader (e.g. 'isolinux'), a kernel (i.e 'bzImage'), an initrd (e.g. 'tinycore.gz') and as an option might also contain a set of extensions to make them available after booting. More about this is available on this wiki page.
I can see that people are getting confused since you need to do both (A) and (B) if you want to create an ISO image that contains a changed initrd (which is the
"more" part I'm referring to above). But if you boot from a hard disk (or USB drive) and just want to change something in the Core system, you do (A) and use the resulting file (e.g. 'tinycore.gz') as a replacement for the one on your respective device.
To make matters even more interesting: as a sort of variation of (A) an option exists to create a kind of "companion" initrd. That is described in this
wiki page. In which case an additional initrd gets created, and the boot loader is instructed to extract those multiple archives into RAM at boot time. Choosing this option makes probably only sense when one wants to add to the Core system and not when a file of the Core system is meant to be changed. As in this latter case you would depend on the order of the extractions to end up with the expected result, I for one would not want to take a bet on this.
A rather good discussion about various aspects of the integration of extensions into an ISO-image can be found from this
post onwards.