Oh, that is possible in debian too, in fact the installer of debian works on this way, you select what you want to have and it installs a metapackage which installs other packages, they are called task-something, for example if you want to have a gnome desktop (which you can also do in Elive), you just need to run "api task-gnome-desktop" 
But I was talking more like customizations / recipes made by the users, check the details in Installation profiles, full modularity, specific purposes
