As you guessed, if you want to use TKLDev and do it "the right way", you'll need to recreate what you've done to date it a series of scripts and/or overlay files. There isn't really anyway around that if you want to use TKLDev.
On the upside, that will make longer term maintenance easier and more robust. And will also allow others to understand what you've done (and the potential implications of that), assuming you wish to share. But how useful that will be will depend on your longer term plans with your project and who your intended market is.
If it's simply a "one off" that you only plan to do just this once, then that may indeed be overkill. Simply resetting the inithooks to re-run on next boot and creating an OVA may indeed be your best bet - assuming that fits your distribution plans. Also, I'm sure it would be possible to generate an ISO from your current OS, I'm just not sure how you'd go about it...
If you plan to maintain your custom appliance into the future (and/or wish to distribute via alternate build types), I would argue that whilst it'll certainly be more work in the short term, porting to TKLDev will create less work in the long term. Updated versions of your custom appliance can simply be rebuilt whenever you fancy (without or without additional tweaks). You can also keep much better track of changes that you've made so if/when things change radically, you can just adjust your changes to suit.
I'm not 100% sure how it'd go, but depending on what you've changed and how, creating a TKLBAM backup, may assist you to checkout at least some of the changes that you've made.
Sorry that I don't have any better news for you, but if you have any more specific questions, please feel free to ask.
Yep, you'll need to "recreate" what you've done to use TKLDev
As you guessed, if you want to use TKLDev and do it "the right way", you'll need to recreate what you've done to date it a series of scripts and/or overlay files. There isn't really anyway around that if you want to use TKLDev.
On the upside, that will make longer term maintenance easier and more robust. And will also allow others to understand what you've done (and the potential implications of that), assuming you wish to share. But how useful that will be will depend on your longer term plans with your project and who your intended market is.
If it's simply a "one off" that you only plan to do just this once, then that may indeed be overkill. Simply resetting the inithooks to re-run on next boot and creating an OVA may indeed be your best bet - assuming that fits your distribution plans. Also, I'm sure it would be possible to generate an ISO from your current OS, I'm just not sure how you'd go about it...
If you plan to maintain your custom appliance into the future (and/or wish to distribute via alternate build types), I would argue that whilst it'll certainly be more work in the short term, porting to TKLDev will create less work in the long term. Updated versions of your custom appliance can simply be rebuilt whenever you fancy (without or without additional tweaks). You can also keep much better track of changes that you've made so if/when things change radically, you can just adjust your changes to suit.
I'm not 100% sure how it'd go, but depending on what you've changed and how, creating a TKLBAM backup, may assist you to checkout at least some of the changes that you've made.
Sorry that I don't have any better news for you, but if you have any more specific questions, please feel free to ask.