[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Really cool developments with SoaS v3

[Dave Bauer]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
...
>
> 4. Build/customization documentation - in addition to actually
> adjusting the process to make customization clean and possible,
> they've written *good documentation* on how to do it, even ready for
> the release date and not done as an afterthought:
> http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/docs/customization-guide/
>
>
> Thanks to the SoaS contributors, great work!
> Daniel
>
...

and thanks to Daniel for the email that inspired this idea.

Based on the idea of making it easy to customize SoaS I had an
advanced idea to make it even easier. I can't personally work on this,
but maybe there is someone who can develop this idea further.

I am thinking of a web-based form that would allow deployments to
customize their own SoaS spin. This would simplify things because the
deployment wouldn't need a lot of bandwidth to build the custom SoaS,
and would not have to setup a Fedora 13 install to do the builds. This
is sort of like http://susestudio.com/ which is supported by Novell,
and unfortunately the underlying platform is not open source.

I chatted with Mel and Sebastian on #sugar last night and we agreed
this was an interesting idea.

The first step could be just a web based form to generate a correct
custom kickstart file, which a deployment would download to do a
custom build.

The next step would be to setup a local Fedora repository so the
packages don't need to be downloaded for every build. Then after that
a system could be designed to take the custom kickstart files and
build custom ISOs.

It would probably make sense to limit this to registered deployments
in the beginning until it was known exactly how much resources would
be consumed.

I hope this summary idea will be useful, and I regret I cannot
personally build this, I really like the idea.

Dave

-- 
Dave Bauer
dave at solutiongrove.com
http://www.solutiongrove.com