Hello all,
you can ignore everything below, since I am neither a software maintainer for Fedora nor Developer of Cockpit.
Therefore, let me thank you for the awesome work you are doing and the value you are adding.
I was following the whole discussion of Cockpit-Samba/NFS integration. From my perspective, it is a nice
feature to have (in the future) and maybe even a cool use case for some users. Nevertheless, we have to
keep in mind, that there are some very prominent statements in the room for both, Fedora and Cockpit,
that will be taken as a promise from users:
## From the Cockpit Project Landing Page:
Cockpit uses APIs that already exist on the system. It doesn’t reinvent subsystems or add a layer of its own tooling.
## From the Fedora Foundations (Features):
We also believe that these changes are best developed in direct concert with the upstream software communities whose work is part of the Fedora distribution. We work with the upstream in cases where we find opportunities for improvement, so all free software users benefit — even if they don’t use Fedora directly.
## My verdict
I don't see any of both reflected in the current implementation of the new Cockpit Fileshare Plugin.
Instead, it is tried to implement a vendor specific addition to Fedora, that is neither related to Cockpit
nor to Fedora and where (as far as I can see) the vendor is not even interested in Fedora:
Therefore the Fedora Team has to prepared for issues like:
- My existing Samba configuration is not shown
- How do I migrate from either config way to the other?
- I installed it and now my data in /var/lib/xxx is not working anymore
- I cannot write /etc/exports
- Stuff in /etc/exports.d/ is not detected properly
Chances are high that users will install the plugin and expect "it just works".
The discussion in this thread alone is showing, that this is not the case.
Getting in touch with the upstream (45Drives and Cockpit) and find a way to solve
these issues or provide downstream patches and documentation seems to be
necessary.
Best regards,
Daniel