Dropping cockpit-kubernetes (Cluster, Image Registry, KubeVirt UI) in the future

[Martin Pitt]

Hello all,

Cockpit's "Kubernetes" package has provided a web UI for managing
Kubernetes/OpenShift deployments for a long time. In the last year it also got
some initial support for showing KubeVirt[1] VMs that run in OpenShift.

Since Red Hat's acquiring of CoreOS there are now *three* web UIs: OpenShift's
own "OpenShift Console", Tectonic, and Cockpit's "Cluster"
dashboard. The first
two are meant to become one at some point [2] and currently see a lot of
development; i. e. Console/Tectonic/Quay will be *the* web UI for OpenShift
(including KubeVirt) soon. On the other hand, cockpit-kubernetes has been in
maintenance mode for a fair while now - both because of that merging effort,
and also because we haven't had (and still don't have) any development capacity
for it in the Cockpit team. It's also rather hard to maintain, being written in
a very old Angular version.

So long-term cockpit-kubernetes will go away. As a strawman I would propose to
still keep it in Fedora 29 (as it's past beta freeze already), but drop it from
Rawhide. Thus there will still be a supported cockpit-kubernetes package for
~ 1.5 more years.

cockpit-kubernetes also contains some support for KubeVirt. Apparently
community interest has waned on that, and we actually haven't been able to
build a recent kubevirt-enabled OpenShift image in four months -- [3] were the
last attempts at fixing it. Thus we had to kick out kubevirt testing from
the openshift image [4], and we'll have to kick it off the openshift-prerelease
image as well if we need to rebuild it at some point. Once this happens, there
is no way how we can further support the KubeVirt bits in cockpit-kubernetes,
so I'd actually like to remove this from Fedora 29 already, in its current
condition.

Is there any interest from anyone to continue to maintain it? If so, then the
best course of action would be to split it off into a separate
cockpit-kubernetes upstream project, like we recently did with cockpit-ostree [5],
and maintain it there (by a different group of people than the Cockpit core
team). Of course we will gladly help you to set this up.

Thanks,

Martin

[1] http://kubevirt.io/
[2]
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-unveils-roadmap-co...
[3] https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/issues/9479 and
https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/pull/9638
[4] https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/commit/2795ceb8ee13
[5] https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-ostree

[Stephen Gallagher]

On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 11:00 AM Martin Pitt <mpitt(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
<snip>
>  So long-term cockpit-kubernetes will go away. As a strawman I would
> propose to
>  still keep it in Fedora 29 (as it's past beta freeze already), but drop it from
>  Rawhide. Thus there will still be a supported cockpit-kubernetes package for
>  ~ 1.5 more years. 
I think if it's going away and is already effectively unsupported, we
should probably drop it from Fedora 29 as well. We haven't actually
*released* Beta, so there's an opportunity to remove it if we land the
change today or early on Monday and get a Freeze Exception BZ
approved. I can help with the latter process if this is the path we
want to take.

[Neal Gompa]

On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 11:38 AM Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 11:00 AM Martin Pitt <mpitt(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  <snip>
>  > So long-term cockpit-kubernetes will go away. As a strawman I would propose to
>  > still keep it in Fedora 29 (as it's past beta freeze already), but drop it from
>  > Rawhide. Thus there will still be a supported cockpit-kubernetes package for
>  > ~ 1.5 more years.
>
>  I think if it's going away and is already effectively unsupported, we
>  should probably drop it from Fedora 29 as well. We haven't actually
>  *released* Beta, so there's an opportunity to remove it if we land the
>  change today or early on Monday and get a Freeze Exception BZ
>  approved. I can help with the latter process if this is the path we
>  want to take. 
I completely agree here. If the Cockpit UI for k8s is no longer
developed and isn't maintained, let's kill it now.



-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!

[Martin Pitt]

Stephen Gallagher [2018-09-14 11:07 -0400]:
>  On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 11:00 AM Martin Pitt <mpitt(a)redhat.com&gt;
> wrote:
>  <snip>
>  > So long-term cockpit-kubernetes will go away. As a strawman I would propose to
>  > still keep it in Fedora 29 (as it's past beta freeze already), but drop it from
>  > Rawhide. Thus there will still be a supported cockpit-kubernetes package for
>  > ~ 1.5 more years.
>  
>  I think if it's going away and is already effectively unsupported, we
>  should probably drop it from Fedora 29 as well. 
I think that would be appropriate for the kubevirt part of the UI.
cockpit-kubernetes at large (Cluster dashboard and Image Registry) continues to
be supported for a while (it has to for downstream), so IMHO it's fine to stay
in Fedora 29. It won't get lots of new features, but we do investigate and fix bugs.

>  We haven't actually *released* Beta, so there's an
> opportunity to remove it
>  if we land the change today or early on Monday and get a Freeze Exception BZ
>  approved. I can help with the latter process if this is the path we want to
>  take. 
OK, so I'll work on removing the kubevirt parts upstream, so that it won't be
contained any more in Wednesday's upstream release. I filed
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1629608 for tracking it in Fedora
29. How do I turn that into an exception BZ?

Thanks,

Martin

[Stephen Gallagher]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 3:59 AM Martin Pitt <mpitt(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  Stephen Gallagher [2018-09-14 11:07 -0400]:
>  > On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 11:00 AM Martin Pitt <mpitt(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  > <snip>
>  > > So long-term cockpit-kubernetes will go away. As a strawman I would propose to
>  > > still keep it in Fedora 29 (as it's past beta freeze already), but drop it
> from
>  > > Rawhide. Thus there will still be a supported cockpit-kubernetes package for
>  > > ~ 1.5 more years.
>  >
>  > I think if it's going away and is already effectively unsupported, we
>  > should probably drop it from Fedora 29 as well.
>
>  I think that would be appropriate for the kubevirt part of the UI.
>  cockpit-kubernetes at large (Cluster dashboard and Image Registry) continues to
>  be supported for a while (it has to for downstream), so IMHO it's fine to stay
>  in Fedora 29. It won't get lots of new features, but we do investigate and fix bugs.
>
>  > We haven't actually *released* Beta, so there's an opportunity to remove it
>  > if we land the change today or early on Monday and get a Freeze Exception BZ
>  > approved. I can help with the latter process if this is the path we want to
>  > take.
>
>  OK, so I'll work on removing the kubevirt parts upstream, so that it won't be
>  contained any more in Wednesday's upstream release. I filed
>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1629608 for tracking it in Fedora
>  29. How do I turn that into an exception BZ?
>  
Actually, it turns out we don't need an exception BZ because
cockpit-kubernetes is not part of the default installation anyway. So
just land it in the updates-testing repo and it'll be fine.