What is the fascination with 'spins'

[Jesse Keating]

On Monday 05 February 2007 10:44, monty19@ hotmail.com wrote:
> I was not suggesting that custom spins are a silly idea.  Like I said in my
> original message, "I'm not saying that the ability to create your own disc
> with just the software you want is necessarilly a bad thing either; it's
> just that with the current route there are going to be a lot more people
> making their own discs, than downloading the ones created by the Fedora
> team, and then what's the point of releasing any at all?"

There is far more involved in making a release than just uploading isos 
somewhere.  Freeze / schedule management, creating a stable tree from which 
to do composes from, QA of the tree, bugfixes, etc, etc... The generated isos 
are just one part of the output, the exploaded tree is the far more important 
part, as well as the static package repositories the release was composed 
from.

> Rather it's just that the only 1.90GB "Desktop" image I've seen/downloaded
> seems sorely lacking, as compared to what I perceive as most users wanting.
>   Granted my view could be skewed and wrong...

A lot of the voices on this list are the technical user sides, not necessarily 
the "Desktop" side.  We're all more "Developer Workstation" type folks, who 
want not only a nice desktop to use, but development tools and even some 
services available.

> Also, everyone keeps talking about these tools to make it easy to create
> your own spin.  If it's going to be a simple to use Linux/Windows (for the
> new users) binary that downloads everything you say you want, creates an
> ISO, and then all you have to do is burn it an install per the usual, then
> I guess who cares what is released as far as Fedora created ISO images.

pungi is the software I wrote and continue to write to do this.  It is 
available in Fedora Extras.  Using it against rawhide is a bit rough, given 
how quickly rawhide is likely to break and to break the compose process, but 
the end goal is that you install pungi, you can tweak a package manifest 
(flat list of package names) a bit to suite your needs, then 
run /usr/bin/pungi -c /etc/pungi/yourconf.  When it is done, you should have 
a directory tree that is the exploaded install tree + iso sets.  There are 
even folks working on graphical front ends to this so you can graphically 
select your packages and push a button to get an end result.  This user 
experience will improve over the course of Fedora 7 development, and beyond.  
I hope that near the end of Fedora 7 development, when the tree has settled 
down a bunch, it will be much easier for folks to do spins and to play with 
the software.

> But, I haven't seen these tools; only vague mention of them so far (do they
> exist?) so what I'm looking at is the image(s) that Fedora is releasing.
>  If the tools for creating your own ISO are simple, user friendly, and
> really do cover every step of the download/creation process, save actually
> burning the disc, then I guess it would negate any concern about what
> 'default' (for lack of a better word) images Fedora is releasing...

That is what pungi does.  You hand it a list of packages you want, and a few 
other config items, it finds those packages in yum repos, depsolves them, 
downloads them, runs some anaconda tools on them, and produces a tree + iso 
set.

>
> Afterall what's the difference between downloading a large ISO image, and
> downloading a small utility that downloads everything it needs to create a
> large ISO image and creates it all behind the scenes...

With the large ISO set you're stuck with what we think should be on there, but 
with the open tools, you can put what _you_ want on there.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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