This is a development branch thing but it's related to Cobbler's plan moving forward, so it seems best to discuss here.
So ... there's been some good work going so far towards supporting some variants of Windows, though I see it may perhaps be somewhat of an evolutionary dead-end.
The web page for RIS-Linux in particular does not mention Vista or 2008. Further, I am much more interested in supporting Windows virtually than physically -- this should be natural with the increasing interest in virtualization and recent interoperability agreements with Microsoft.
For the devel branch (1.7), I'd rather we refocus our efforts into making sure the experience for Windows installs, virtually, is as good as possible.
The upside of this is that most of the infrastructure is already in place -- we can already do ISO based fullvirt installs ("cobbler image add" with the ISO file residing on NFS) and a next step is to teach it about a virtual floppy drive with the SIF answer file on the drive, so it can be fully scripted.
We already also have the "virt-clone" image type, for being able to take an existing disk image and repeatedly clone that image with koan, keeping the same source image on NFS. (The syntax here is "koan --image=foo --virt", just like with the ISO based installs for virt).
The goal here is to not invest too much effort in supporting dead-end deployment areas and writing code to cater to say, XP vs Vista vs 2003 vs 2008, but handle things generically, with answer files, and images, things we already do. On the plus side, there's also much less work in doing this and no additional dependencies or things to configure and set up.
Rather than physical deployments this encourages deploying Windows on Linux hosts, which makes the Windows machines easier to manage since you can run tools like libvirt and Func on the hosts. See http://www.redhat.com/promo/svvp/
Windows belongs running on virt. In general, for non-Linux OS's, we should also concentrate on virt.
--Michael