XPE: Components or 'Components' ?

Andy Allred is asking an interesting question over on the XPE blog - Windows XP Embedded SP2 Feature Pack 2007 ships with approximately 12,000 components - roughly 9,000 drivers and 3,000 o/s components - Andy is asking whether having the o/s componentized at this level makes sense for you or not.

There are three options (as I see it)...

1. Leave the XPE operating system componentized at the driver/technology level - you (the developer) get to pick and choose the components that go into your operating system image - right down to the individual components for a specific technology - this means that you will probably spend more time componentizing the operating system and building/testing the o/s image before you ship your device.

2. "Bucket" the o/s components at a much higher level - for example having a component like "Audio Stack" which pulls in all audio features into an operating system build - this would reduce the amount of time needed to configure/build/test/deploy an XPE image but at the same time increase the underlying operating system image size

3. "Component Mashup" - leave the 12,000 underlying o/s components "as is" and create a series of macro components that provide the higher level components for "Audio Stack" "Networking" or whatever else...

Thoughts, comments? - go ahead and leave a comment over on the XPE blog.

- Mike