Robin Getz writes:
 > I poked around the archives a bit, and didn't see the answer.
 > 
 > Is there any plan to add support for mkyaffsimage to be able to accept 
 > device tables, similar to mkjffs2 or genext2fs? (-D, --devtable <file>)

You might want to try fakeroot.  Debian developers use this library
shim to build package archives which include devices, etc.  It works
well for me to build cramfs file system images without root or setuid
and I suspect it would work fine with mkyaffsimage as well.  I think
fakeroot originated with the Debian project, but you should be able to
build or find it for other distributions.

--Brad