Adding a cockpit to Node

For several years now the administrative interface of oVirt Node is a TUI - a textual user interface - displayed on the console of the host, the so called setup TUI. It does a pretty good job, but it is custom, and duplicates much code which is available in other projects. Besides that a lot of our bugs are related to the TUI and small stuff like getting the tab-order correctly is hard to solve.

For oVirt 3.6 (or so) we plan to do some heavy refactoring of oVirt Node, to be able to keep up with the pace of oVirt’s overall development, as well as beeing able to keep up with the pace of the platform (Feodra, CentOS) development!

This refatoring includes looking around if other community supported projects exist, which provide parts of the functionality we have in Node.

The cockpit project is one those (young) projects which provide a tool which has a big overlap with one of our tools, to be precise: It is also a tool perform administrative tasks on a host.

As the Node team had some time between FOSDEM'15 and devconf.cz, we sat down and discussed if cockpit is viable way to go. After some discussion we finally agreed in one of our last meetings to migrate to cockpit, and add plugins for the functionality which is currently desired by us, but missing from cockpit.

We are now heavily looking into what the best approach is to migrate our stuff. But it is going to be a fun ride, with a (hopefully) happy end.

If you want to see where this is going, follow our feature page.

::: {#footer} [ February 19th, 2015 11:27am ]{#timestamp} [ovirt]{.tag} [node]{.tag} [cockpit]{.tag} [tui]{.tag} [snack]{.tag} [newt]{.tag} [urwid]{.tag} :::