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On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 07:05:04PM +0100, Beth Elwell wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I am currently in the process of writing an Ironic panel in Horizon
> upstream. It was originally intended for this panel to be written in
> Angular JS, however, as I understand, no horizon angular work will
> merge for several months, and 2-3 panels (of which ironic is not one)
> are being moved to the feature branch to iterate on the design pattern
> that they want to use to implement the angular.
> 
> With regard to the ironic panel, this means that in order to implement
> it in angular, it will take weeks or perhaps months to merge and even
> when it does, it may well need to be rewritten to follow design patterns
> being set at the moment.
> 
> Therefore I propose that I continue to develop this as a Horizon python
> panel as a short term solution to allow a UI to exist for our users of
> Ironic ASAP and longer term make use of the ironic webclient and the
> work that krotscheck is currently doing on that.
> 
> I would appreciate feedback with regard to whether the ironic community
> are happy for me to continue on with developing a horizon panel or would
> like me to work on an angular panel.

In general, I like the idea of "get a web interface to users quickly",
and in that spirit I think building a horizon panel is the right thing
to do.

I do love the webclient work; I think it's great. However, considering
that (as far as I know) there's only two people working on Ironic web
interfaces, is it valuable to be working on two different web interfaces
right now? In the worst case:

* horizon panel will be built
* webclient will also be built
* horizon will figure out angular stuff
* webclient will be re-written to work with horizon
* webclient will likely take significant time to merge into horizon
* old horizon panel will be deprecated
* (in time) old horizon panel will be removed

And in the best case, only the rewrite step is skipped, and maybe the
merge into horizon won't take long. There's also a question about how
much different the two are, and how large of a leap that is for users.

That seems like a lot of extra effort and maintenance for an entire
team; let alone two people. So I question if it's worth working on the
webclient, or punting on that until horizon is ready, and then
refactoring the horizon panel into angular.

Is there a clear benefit to having both worked on in parallel?

// jim