Dear Scott,
On 12/22/2010 05:52 PM, Scott Henson wrote:
I'm considering a move off of Cheetah as the templating language for
Cobbler. I am personally leaning towards django or jinja(1 or 2
depending on the EL4 discussion). I would like to know opinions people
have on if we should move and what we should move to.
Cheetah is simple, but quite messy and confusing. The confusing thing is
the # at the beginning of each command while a # in front of a entry in
a ks file is a comment. Mixing those two thing ends up in a mess.
Additionally, debugging Cheetah based snippets is a nightmare.
I do not know about django or jinja. Maybe it would be a good idea to
publish some mock-ups of snippets based on those two templating engines.
It also means quite some work to migrate all the snippets in place to
the new templating engine. So old Cobbler versions with Cheetah should
be maintained for some time to give people enough time to migrate.
At the end of the day, I think it is a good idea to switch.
Additionally, I'm considering if we should continue to explicitly
support EL4 for running Cobbler on. This would be due to the fact that
many of the really nice templating languages are just not supported on
the version of python that EL4 runs. We would continue to support
running koan on EL4 (in fact I think we will still run all the way back
to AS2.1). Are there people that are still running Cobbler on EL4?
As EL4 is quite old and soon reaching its end of the life cycle (Feb
2012 w/o considering ELS) I think people can life with some updates for
severe bugfixes for Cobbler on EL4. (Lets say for Cobbler 1.6 and maybe 2.x)
For cobbler with a new templating engine, lets say Cobbler 3.0, IMHO it
should be based on EL6.
Thanks,
Luc