I am now at the speach of Andreas Tille about CDDs and let me dump here my idea, what the CDD framerowk should do.

• it should be enough to write one structured text file to create a CDD

• you can select a set of packages that are: needed, recommended, conflicted;
• you can preseed debconf database with answers;
• you can do some specific changes to the conffiles or other files (as diffs or rewrite rules);
• you can add/remove some text or binary files;
• you can recompile a package (with a patch);
• you can add some package that is not yet in Debian;
  

the framework can generate a set of packages that could be uploaded to Debian, to allow a Debian user to 'apt-get install cdd-something'

the framework can generate a simplified installation CD that installs the CDD with a minimum amount of questions

the framework can generate a LiveCD with the CDD

a summary of bug reports that relate to the CDD should be gettable

all the actions for a CDD should be possible to be done on Debian infrastructure. cdd.debian.org portal with standartized interfaces for every CDD for documentation, information, bug summaries, cvs/arch/svn/... links, links to all CDs, links to web forums, ...

all the actions for a CDD should be possible to be done fully independently from Debian. Packages for that should be inside Debian and should be easy to install/configure

a CDD must be able to do releases independantly from Debian

the should be a way to do security updates for all relased CDDs for some fixed time period

any CDD could be derrived either from plain Debian of from any other CDD

The feature set must be complete enough to have Ubuntu as a CDD

I will add more, once I remember more ideas.