For those not following the cobbler-devel mailing list, an update of what's going on with 2.0

[Michael DeHaan]

The development branch is coming along nicely thus far.

As I mentioned previously, 2.0 uses Django as the web framework.   To 
users, this means little, except that the URL to access cobbler
is now http://127.0.0.1/cobbler_web/, and cobbler web is now part of a 
seperate optional package called, you guessed it, "cobbler-web".

We can now launch all sorts of background tasks via the web app, making 
it possible to use the command line less (if you want).   This means
that you can import from the web app (currently in progress), update 
repos, do batch power management without the UI blocking (pending), and
also run sync, hardlink, and reposync commands.    There is a task 
engine that logs each of these actions seperately from the main logfile.

There are also new "filters", making it easy to be able to search any of 
the lists by criteria (multiple kinds if neccessary) to only show what 
you are looking for.
This is much shinier than the old search feature and I'm excited about it.

We have also introduced "AJAXy" alerts, which show when tasks start or 
complete.  If you are logged in and your colleague starts an import, you 
will
see alerts of what is happening.  (Currently it's not smart enough to 
say /who/ is doing what, TBA).    Mainly though this is intended to just 
let you see
the status of those background tasks we mentioned earlier.    We may 
also include other DHTML/AJAX as time goes on... Cobbler Web is really 
starting to look sharp, and I'm happy to see this happen.   (Perhaps 
we'll also get around to implementing expand/collapse features to hide 
groups of fields?)

The next phase after polishing up the web app and making 
nearly-everything you can do in the command line tool doable in Cobbler 
Web will be "remoting"
the cobbler command line.   This means that the cobbler command line 
will speak to Cobblerd over XMLRPC instead of running locally.   Why is 
that?   Well,
basically it's to avoid internal fun of trying to keep the command line 
in sync with the web app.  It will mean that even for very large 
configurations of data
the command line will fly, faster than before... though for smaller 
configurations it will basically be the same.  It will also mean (in the 
future) you will probably be able to configure remote cobbler servers 
via the command line, if you really want.

(Just to keep things balanced, we have /cut/ some things from the plan 
for 2.0 though -- most likely Network Objects, a feature to auto assign 
IPs and network information to systems without rekeying a lot of network 
info, will not make it.   Hopefully in the next release.  If someone 
wants to come along and help with those, of course, that may help 
accelerate things)

The development branch also has another major plus in that we've removed 
a lot of code from Cobbler, so it is easier to hack on than ever -- any 
contributor
will be able to add a new field to cobbler and not worry about having to 
update the web application or command line code to make it usable.  It 
will just work
from the start.   I hope this will open the door for even more exciting 
contributions -- though we already have some great ones.

If you do want to contribute, or just keep up with what is going on, you 
can do so by subscribing to cobbler-devel here:  
https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler-devel

Thanks for the continued interest!

--Michael