Live Re-Spins and Localized Spins

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

Hi there,

Fedora Unity is seriously considering Re-Spinning the Live Spins 
released with Fedora 10, based on Fedora 10 + updates. We might call 
them Re-Live-Spins, just for the fun of it ;-)

We know there is, or there has been, a lot of politics involved with the 
topic of Re-Spinning in general, and with the idea of Live Re-Spins even 
more so, as there has been when we first started with the regular 
installation media Re-Spins, or back in the day when we did the first 
Fedora Live Spin (using Kadischi). I think it's fair to say that, so 
far, we have not embarrassed anyone, despite the concerns or distrust.

Different arguments in previous discussions include, amongst others, the 
concern that Quality Assurance on our part might be lacking in 
comparison to the QA done on regular releases, and the fact that these 
Re-Spins or Live Re-Spins have not been composed on Fedora 
Infrastructure -wrt. security risks. All well so far, but the fact that 
these arguments have always been... let's just say... less constructive, 
not to bluntly say they have often been condescending, and sometimes 
even offensive.

After more then 12 releases of the Fedora Unity Re-Spins, we feel 
confident we have the team suited to fulfill the desire of the community 
to get their hands on some Live Re-Spins.

You may be wondering... "What part of the community are we talking 
about? How many people download these things anyway?". Well, at the time 
of this writing, 820 people are downloading the Fedora Unity spins[1] 
through BitTorrent, compared to 628 for the Fedora Project spins[2]. 
Bear in mind both have alternative distribution methods as well and 
these numbers do not represent anything -it's just an indication of the 
amount of people downloading Re-Spins and Fedora Unity Spins (Such as 
the Everything Spin).

Since it's not like we're on a tight schedule or anything, we wanted to 
give the Fedora Advisory Board a chance to tune in on our thoughts and 
process and discussion and tell us what you think, hopefully bringing 
some new arguments to the table.

A few more things to ponder;

- Fedora Unity wholeheartedly agrees with the fact these spins should be 
created on proper Fedora Infrastructure. Now, if only we could get our 
hands on a x86_64 Fedora instance... Regardless of the specific version 
of Fedora because our tools allow cross-composing stuff.

- Fedora Unity's Test team will make sure the Live Re-Spins also pass 
the respective QA TestCases. We may even come up with a few more as we 
put the spins through the wringer.

- Fedora Unity has automated the process. Scripts take care of 
jigdofying, torrentifying and distributing the Re-Spins and Live 
Re-Spins amongst several peers which, once the initial distribution has 
taken place, will become jigdo mirrors or torrent seeds.

- Yes, these efforts might be (are) better spent at testing rawhide or 
even Alpha/Beta/RC/GA releases. Don't worry, many of our efforts have 
resulted in testing what was to be in Alpha/Beta/RC/GA before it ever 
happened. Besides, it's not like we're proposing supporting Fedora 
releases until after it's EOL dates.

- Yes, these efforts might be (are) better spent at testing rawhide or 
even Alpha/Beta/RC/GA releases. However, with the Remix tools and 
configuration files being out there, someone has to take up the effort 
of supporting *current* releases -that includes the kickstarts, the 
tools, the applications (anaconda, pykickstart, etc), the packages 
included on spins, and the overall size of the spin. Right now, only 
Fedora Unity bothers.

- Fedora Unity has the tools to include sources with the spins. We have 
been distributing sources with our spins from the beginning, and we will 
continue to do so.

- The size of each Live Spin to be respun is most likely to increase. 
The same thing happens when a user respins the live media, and we are 
most likely to end up stripping packages off the live media, bearing in 
mind the original maintainer of the spin might be willing to help us and 
preserving the original use-case of the spin, or we are having oversized 
media that only fits DVDs. Right now, several Fedora 10 spins (when 
respun by a user) experience the effect of larger updates and pulled-in 
dependencies.

- The Fedora Unity team is also considering releasing Localized Live 
Re-Spins, finally aiding those particular parts of the community that 
request localized spins when walking up a booth at any given event, and 
those parts that request localized spins before they even go attend at a 
booth.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip

[1] http://spinner.fedoraunity.org:6969/
[2] http://torrent.fedoraproject.org:6969/