At the moment, if you look at
http://beaker-project.org/dev/proposals/handling-large-installations.html it
says that Beaker 0.16 will focus on various workflow changes in the
system page.
Dan Callaghan has been working on those changes internally, and while
we're really happy with how they have worked out, we also realised they
need to properly communicated externally before we include them in a
release. (If you want to try them out, Dan's patch series targeting the
new-system-page feature branch has all the details. This is the
currently the final patch in that chain:
http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/#/c/2687/)
Accordingly, we're going to be adjusting the major user facing features
included in the next few releases.
Short version:
* Beaker 0.15.3: CLI updates, system page styling update
* Beaker 0.16: git based task execution
* Beaker 0.17 (probably): system page updates
Timeline wise, we currently expect 0.15.3 to be available in late
January, 0.16 in mid February, and 0.17 some time after that.
Long version:
* the CLI additions currently mentioned under Beaker 0.16 that weren't
already included in Beaker 0.15.2 have all been included in the upcoming
Beaker 0.15.3 maintenance release instead. Beaker 0.15.3 will also
include some styling improvements to the system page, as that page
really didn't fare well in the original transition to the new Bootstrap
based web UI styling.
* rather than the major system page update, the Beaker 0.16 release will
instead focus on incorporating Bill Peck's proposal (and patch) for
execution of tasks directly from git
(
http://beaker-project.org/dev/proposals/external-tasks.html). This
should resolve most of the major versioning issues currently associated
with the RPM task library, since users will be free to define their own
versioning based on git branches, repo names, etc. The task library
itself won't be going anywhere, however - in addition to the obvious
backwards compatibility requirements, it's also a convenient way to
distribute the standard tasks that are part of Beaker's normal operation
like reservesys, uploading Anaconda install logs, configuring and
starting guest recipes and running the inventory scripts.
* we will also be preparing a design proposal that describes in detail
the changes being made to the system page, along with the reasons for
each of them. Some of the current workflows (especially in 0.14 and
earlier) are quite error prone and confusing, and the only reason for
that is that the old web UI infrastructure made it difficult to improve
them. With the new web UI stack introduced in 0.15, we now have
substantially better development tools at our disposal, and are bringing
that to bear to make the system page more intuitive and to remove the
duplication between some aspects of the provisioning tab and the system
reservation workflow.
The aim will then be to land the updated system page in Beaker 0.17,
partly because we don't want to maintain that feature branch outside the
main line of development for too long, but mostly because we think it
really does represent a major enhancement to Beaker's usability.
Cheers,
Nick.
--
Nick Coghlan
Red Hat Hosted & Shared Services
Software Engineering & Development, Brisbane
Testing Solutions Team Lead
Beaker Development Lead (
http://beaker-project.org/)