Hi all,

I would like to attempt clarifying Cockpit's position regarding the server roles and Ansible.

One of the key aspects of Cockpit is that it's basically a Linux session in your browser. As such there are a lot of great advantages regarding the user interface and experience, but also a few caveats, such as tabs / parallel sessions / connection issues / updating what's shown to the user. That said, one of the primary goals is to make server administration discoverable and provide a good user experience.

When we add functionality to Cockpit, we do this in a design driven fashion and start with the user stories. If I, as a user, want my server to perform a specific role, Ansible is an implementation detail. If I'm an admin and want to tinker with one system and generate an Ansible playbook comfortably, that's a different use case. There are more stories, but my point is this: When adding something to Cockpit, we don't want our goal to be "let's bring these two cool pieces of technology together". We want to solve something for the user and change the underlying technology if necessary.

In order to get optimal user experience, we want reliable system APIs that can be used by Cockpit, Ansible and everyone else. The Cockpit team believes it's worth investing more effort into developing such APIs properly than focusing only on making Ansible playbooks work well within Cockpit. I'm not saying Cockpit won't use Ansible or talk to it - see the proof of concept for NFS configuration [0]. Working on the proof of concept has shown us the critical points of combining Cockpit and Ansible by running playbooks from Cockpit to the point where we decided to step back and think about the big picture. We definitely don't want Cockpit to be an "alternate Tower" and we want to avoid duplicating effort wherever possible.

Thanks,
-Dominik

[0] https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/pull/5745


On 02/28/2017 11:08 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>
===================================================================
#fedora-meeting-1: Server Working Group Weekly Meeting (2017-02-28)
===================================================================


Meeting started by sgallagh at 21:01:15 UTC. The full logs are available
at
https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2017-02-28/server_working_group_weekly_meeting_(2017-02-28).2017-02-28-21.01.log.html
.



Meeting summary
---------------
* roll call  (sgallagh, 21:01:15)

* Agenda  (sgallagh, 21:05:44)
  * Agenda Item: Feedback on the Domain Controller Role second draft
    (sgallagh, 21:05:54)
  * Agenda Item: Cockpit and Ansible Status  (sgallagh, 21:05:55)

* Feedback on the Domain Controller Role second draft  (sgallagh,
  21:08:08)
  * LINK:
    https://github.com/libre-server/proposals/tree/master/Domain%20Controller
    (sgallagh, 21:08:24)
  * AGREED: Server SIG accepts the Domain Controller Role proposal (+7,
    0, -0)  (sgallagh, 21:23:05)

* Cockpit and Ansible Status  (sgallagh, 21:23:40)
  * ACTION: vvaldez, jds2001 and sgallagh to attend Cockpit meeting on
    3/13 and discuss role developments and Ansible  (sgallagh, 22:05:23)

Meeting ended at 22:07:21 UTC.




Action Items
------------
* vvaldez, jds2001 and sgallagh to attend Cockpit meeting on 3/13 and
  discuss role developments and Ansible




Action Items, by person
-----------------------
* jds2001
  * vvaldez, jds2001 and sgallagh to attend Cockpit meeting on 3/13 and
    discuss role developments and Ansible
* sgallagh
  * vvaldez, jds2001 and sgallagh to attend Cockpit meeting on 3/13 and
    discuss role developments and Ansible
* vvaldez
  * vvaldez, jds2001 and sgallagh to attend Cockpit meeting on 3/13 and
    discuss role developments and Ansible
* **UNASSIGNED**
  * (none)




People Present (lines said)
---------------------------
* sgallagh (109)
* jds2001 (39)
* vvaldez (21)
* smooge (15)
* zodbot (13)
* adamw (9)
* nirik (9)
* mjwolf (5)
* mhayden (4)
* linuxmodder (3)
* misc (3)
* jds2001_ (2)
* geppetto (2)
* dperpeet (0)




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