Re: Volunteer needed: Snapshot live image project

[Frederic Crozat <fred crozat net>]

2010/12/8 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?

I've already started to work on a GNOME-Shell GIT ISO, using both OBS
(http://build.opensuse.org/) which does now support source service,
allowing easy packaging from git snapshots, and SUSE Studio to
generate the ISO (or USB image) itself (also, I'd like to use OBS to
generate the image, so it could be generate one time in a raw).

In addition to your requirement (except maybe the prefix thing, but it
can be easily modified), we could have automatic update handling for
the GIT package, so people wouldn't have to regenerate their entire
USB stick.

Any opposition ?

-- 
Frederic Crozat