I’d like to illuminate a bit the process by which the Fedora Desktop CD image gets made.

People

Ultimately, the content of the image is created by people. Yes, those names you see on the Internet have real people behind them. After creating content (source code, art, documentation, etc.), it’s typically added to:

Revision Control (git)

A revision control system is a shared online service where people can put changes to a particular component, from applications like Rhythmbox to operating system plumbing like the Linux kernel. From revision control, content is pulled by Fedora into:

Fedora Package CVS

Fedora uses a system of tracking the content of these repositories around the internet called Fedora CVS. This content is pulled periodically at the discretion of a package maintainer. When it’s added to Fedora CVS, it then gets submitted to:

Koji

The Koji service turns the content of the Package CVS into files called .rpm which are consumable components that can be installed individually, but for the purpose of the CD, are combined at a high level using:

Comps

The Fedora Comps is simply a list of these packages. For our purpose here, the most important part is a group called @gnome-desktop which defines the components (out of the universe of packages in the Fedora repositories) that are installed by default on the desktop. From comps, we now turn to:

spin-kickstarts

The spin-kickstarts project uses Kickstart files to combine the comps grouping of packages above with some “extra sauce” such as scripts. (For example, the Live images are specifically modified not to perform software updates while they’re in “Live” mode). The specific kickstart file of interest is fedora-livecd-desktop.ks. This kickstart file is then consumed by:

LiveCD tools

The LiveCD tools consume the kickstart file, a comps listing, and a repository of RPMS and actually creates the final CD image.

This whole process happens nightly, and the results currently appear here. I hope you learned something and/or found this interesting!