Debootstrap is used to create a Debian base system from scratch,
without requiring the availability of dpkg or apt. It does this by
downloading .deb files from a mirror site, and carefully unpacking
them into a directory which can eventually be chrooted into.

It's especially useful if you need to work on debian-like systems
without having to install them over our beloved Slackware ;-)

As we do not have dpkg, remember to always pass an architecture to
debootstrap using the --arch switch.