Web based interface for custom spins

[seth vidal]

On Sun, 2007-06-10 at 11:58 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le dimanche 10 juin 2007 à 15:23 +0530, Rahul Sundaram a écrit :
> > Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > > Le dimanche 10 juin 2007 à 08:44 +0530, Rahul Sundaram a écrit :
> > > 
> > >> Having a web interface would allow anyone to select the package groups 
> > >> and individual packages and get a ISO image for download. I posted to 
> > >> fedora-infrastructure list before but we need a web app before talking 
> > >> about deploying it.
> > > 
> > > Yay for killing bandwidth
> > 
> > Ignoring the obvious end user benefits?
> 
> There are no obvious end-user benefits if an infrastructure that could
> handle lots of users melts under a few doing iso spins (I suppose you
> want dvd images in there too right?)

I'm going to say something here which I'm sure will cause a bit of a fit
but I'll say it anyway. The bandwidth and server costs of running a
service like this would be huge. What has been discussed (briefly and
without much detail is this)

1. produce an open source tool to produce web-based respins of fedora
(and related) distros.
2. release this tool so anyone could set up their own site to make
respinds
3. setup a site so people can respin fedora with updates or with a
different set of packages. There won't be much guarantee that the distro
will work perfectly but its package set should produce dependency
closure. 
4. charge a fee for access to the site we run. That would help us offset
the costs and constrain the set of users a bit.

That's what has been discussed and only a little bit. Right now the
important part is making a program work to do this, everything after
that is extra.

let the angst and flames begin.
-sv