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
cobbler@lists.fedorahosted.org