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Instead of avoiding a BBL at creation time, it seems like it might be less effort to just let it go ahead and create one then, and then remove it before first putting the array into production.

The removal procedure described in the article seems pretty straightforward. The only problem with it seems to be that have to take your server out of production while you do it, which only applies after the server has entered production.

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To remove the BBL from the devices that make up the array that the root filesystem is on you would need to boot into a rescue environment and assemble it there.

While the debian-installer does provide the rescue environment that you need to do this, it is by no means trivial.

Speaking as the article author I find it way way simpler to create the arrays from the shell at the start, rather than have to remember to reboot into d-i again, choose the rescue mode, tell it not to automatically assemble, drop to shell and assemble there. It's also faster — most of my servers take more than 60 seconds before even the serial-over-lan starts to display output!

That won't work in automated provisioning of "bare metal". It needs to happen automatically during mass-provisioning of systems.

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