Open Stack

A rewrite is definitely the direction I think we need to go, without
abandoning Horizon as it stands right now of course.

While I understand the packaging pain, I worry about points 1 and 2,
because I fear that we have no real choice but to use npm, and some JS
frameworks and libraries regardless of what we do. We can try and keep
the list of dependencies small, but that's not something anyone can
promise really. That's just the reality of modern front end development
these days and we will just have to work around it.

That said, take my support or opinion of this with a grain of salt. I'm
not a Horizon core dev, I do maintain Catalyst Cloud's custom plugins,
and our internal fork/customisations, so I know the codebase, but mostly
I'm somehow who works with Horizon and is frustrated by it, and has been
vocal about it (and the 'need' for a rewrite).

Although I wish we could, Catalyst Cloud doesn't right now have the
resources to put towards helping push this, but I'd still love to help
out if I could. Plus the second we have any front end resources, I'd
push internally to have them help with a New Horizon.

As corny as it sounds, I think the first step is admitting we have a
problem, and getting a group of interested parties involved to actually
design/build something better by broadcasting a call to arms of sorts.

On 26/06/20 8:24 am, Mohammed Naser wrote:
> This has been a really interesting discussion but it seems like we
> might be hitting a few things
>
> 1. Distributions are happy in the way that Horizon is deployed today
> 2. Distributions don't want to have a front-end JS based thingamajig
> 3. Users, operators and deployers want to improve the UI experience of Horizon
> 4. There is so much _historic_ stuff stuffed into Horizon that
> rewriting something from scratch is easier than refactoring Horizon
> 5. The path to improving UI inside OpenStack is "starting from scratch".
>
> From my side, I think for the future of OpenStack, simplicity of our
> users and our operators that are involved here, it's time for a
> rewrite.  I feel like Adrian is probably supportive of this too.  I
> think it's too late to "cleanup" and the progress we can make by
> iterating on new technologies can get us there way quicker.