A draft proposal for Fedora spins

This week Jeff Spaleta posted a draft proposal for a spin submission and approval process. For those interested in creating officially approved Fedora spins, it is worth a look.

Anyone can create a Fedora spin for their personal use. Just create a kickstart file to install the packages you want. There are various ways of doing this, but the Anaconda kickstart is probably the most common. This kickstart file tells the Anaconda installer what packages you want, and you have your own Fedora spin.

This draft is about creating official spins that will be listed at the Fedora Project Spins Tracker, and available for interested users to get the official Fedora spin of their choice. However there does need to be a way to cleanly distinguish between Released Spins and Contributed Spins.

What will it take to create an official Fedora spin according to this proposal? The first step is get a kickstart file into the Kickstart Pool, where the file will be reviewed and tested by a peer group of Spin Maintainers. If the peer group approves then the spin proposal goes to the board for review. If the Fedora Board approves the spin it will be granted trademark usage and from there it can be added to the Fedora CVS.

A number of steps need to be completed for this plan to work. First is the creation of Spin Guidelines. The guidelines will specify a minimum level of technical quality for kickstart files, and contain a naming scheme for new spins. The not-yet-formed peer group of Spin Maintainers will have some say in these Guidelines, although the release engineering team will probably create the first draft.

There is a long way to go to get a straightforward way for a Fedora Special Interest Group (or anyone else) to get a spin approved, but such things always have a start somewhere.

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I'm not experienced in rpm-based distributions, but do they have a `debootstrap' like system ?

Aka, can you build a fedora spin from a minimal base instead of beginning from the full
distribution then removing packages from it ?

Yes, if you are building packages locally you can use mock

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Projects/Mock

Fedora build systems, plague and koji take advantage of this. 

Fedora has specialized tools for building a spin. These is livecd-tools for live images, ext3
images or software appliances and pungi for regular installation images and revisor which is a
graphical interface that does either.  Refer

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CustomSpins

There is also more detailed information on how livecd creator works at 

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/LiveCDHowTo