Hello Jonathan,
Jonathan Aquilina [2019-10-06 5:39 +0000]:
I have a question. I understand that cockpit is still in its infancy
Software is never "done", but I daresay Cockpit is a rather mature project by
now. It has shipped in all major distros
(
https://cockpit-project.org/running.html) for quite a while :-)
but are there plans to add more apps that can be managed through
cockpit?
Indeed the "cockpit ecosystem" in the sense of "other people writing
extensions" can be called infancy stage. There's UIs for composer, podman,
session-recording, Leapp, RHEL's subscription-manager, and OSTree, and some
PoCs for installing Fleet Commander and FreeIPA server through Cockpit's
Applications page (i. e. they are/were in Fedora for a while, but not e. g. in
RHEL or other distros).
The cockpit team itself doesn't currently have plans to write more, but that's
also not our primary goal. We don't want to become experts in everything, but
want to provide the tools and help for *other* teams to provide cockpit UIs for
their technology. For that we offer the Starter Kit
(
https://github.com/cockpit-project/starter-kit), documentation like
https://cockpit-project.org/external/wiki/Contributing.html and the blog posts
linked from there, and are happy to get in personal touch to help teams with
coding struggles, CI setup, etc.
Also what is the best way to start contributing to the project?
There's no general answer to that, as it really depends on who wants to get
involved and why. Usually in FOSS, someone has an "itch", a bug they want to
fix, or a feature they want, or some Cockpit UI they want/need in their
environment. For these cases, reporting a GitHub issue (bug/feature in the
cockpit project itself), or tinkering with the starter-kit and forking it to
your own UI (see above) is a great way to start.
Others want to learn JavaScript/HTML or just programming in general. If you
don't have a specific itch to scratch, we have plenty of things to do that are
suitable for beginners, i. e. which don't require a comprehensive and deep
understanding of the whole cockpit project:
https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+...
In either case, you are always welcome to discuss particular ideas or questions
on IRC in #cockpit, or here on the mailing list, or in GitHub.
Thanks,
Martin