Volunteer needed: Snapshot live image project

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

So currently trying out GNOME 3 requires one of two things: either
installing some operating system under heavy development, or doing a
day-long jhbuild from source.

At the meeting today we were discussing that we'd like to have another
option - that if we want to do QA or user testing on the release, or
just let people try out things out quickly. So if it would be really
cool if we could provide GNOME live CD images.

Some of the attributes:

 * GNOME build from latest sources, not from tarball releases. We
   only manage to do a full tarball snapshot every few weeks and it
   takes a lot of chasing from the release team. This is too slow
   a tempo for a nightly build.

   We have a definition of "all of GNOME" and a means to build it -
   which is jhbuild so that's what we should use to create these
   live CDs.

   GNOME is installed into /gnome, overlaps are removed from /usr and
   the configuration is set up so that it"just works".

 * GNOME branded and using GNOME applications.

   (Obviously some decision points here - do we include
   LibreOffice even though it doesn't really reflect the design vision
   of GNOME, to get a better reflection of how users will actually
   interact with GNOME 3, etc.)

 * Using some pretty stable substrate. The choice of substrate is
   really up to the volunteer - what they are familiar and comfortable
   with - as a Fedora person, if I was doing
   it, I might do something like use Fedora 14 + the graphics
   snapshot packages from:
 
     http://people.freedesktop.org/~ajax/f14-bling-repo/

   because I know there are some important graphics fixes post
   Fedora 14. But a similar substrate could be derived from other
   distros - Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, etc. If done correctly,
   the substrate should be close to invisible.

 * No way to install locally or update. Keep it simple, let's not
   worry about things we don't have answers to.

 * Designed for USB operation not CD operation. Packing everything
   into a CD sized image can be painful and since we want people
   to test it, rather than install it, the better performance of USB
   sticks is important.

 * Maybe include debugging symbols for the built GNOME and for
   important libraries that might be involved in backtraces.

 * As automated as possible but no more so. We probably at least need
   some sort of manual QA to make sure that the top download link
   is for a snapshot that isn't entirely broken.

Anybody interested in taking on this project?

- Owen