WIP

_posts/2024-02-08-year-of-agama.md

@@ -0,0 +1,94 @@
+---
+layout: post
+date: 2024-02-08 12:00:00 +00:00
+title: The Year of Agama
+description: Take a look to the Agama roadmap for 2024
+permalink: blog/2024-02-08/year-of-agama
+tags:
+- Project
+- Programming
+- Systems Management
+- YaST
+- Agama
+---
+
+At the end of 2023 we announced Agama 7 stating that version is the first protype we could consider
+to be (quoting ourselves) "functional enough", covering areas such as localization, network
+configuration, storage setup, authentication basis and some software selection. Now it's time to go
+deeper into every area... and we have a plan for that.
+
+## The Agama Roadmap for 2024 {#roadmap}
+
+They say "plans are useless, but planning is indispensable". So we decided to do the indispensable
+exercise of planning the first months of 2024 and we came with this useless plan.
+
+Although we will keep delivering new versions of Agama at a relatively constant pace, we established
+two milestones as control points. The first milestone is expected around mid April, the second one
+is scheduled to mid July. Then we used those two milestones to group the next tasks we want to
+tackle.
+
+April's milestone should result in a revamped architecture for Agama which should not longer depend
+on Cockpit and in a more comprehensive user interface for configuring the storage setup. Both
+aspects are explained in depth in this blog post.
+
+July's milestone 2 should bring mechanisms to make Agama more adaptable and many improvements to
+unattended installation, so Agama can start to be considered a worthy contender to AutoYaST.
+
+Let's dive into the improvements expected for the first milestone.
+
+## Arquitectural Changes {#architecture}
+
+So far, we have built Agama on top of the infrastructure provided by the
+[Cockpit project](https://cockpit-project.org/). That allowed us to bootstrap the project quickly
+without having to invest too much on aspects like authentication or serving files to the web
+interface. But after more than a year of Agama development we now have a clear view on how we want
+to do certain things, and Cockpit is starting to feel like a limiting factor.
+
+See more details at [this Github discussion](https://github.com/openSUSE/agama/discussions/1000),
+but in short we concluded the small of amount of functionality we are getting out of Cockpit does
+not justify the strong dependency, especially now that Cockpit is adopting Python as an integral
+part of their runtime.
+
+So we will invest the following months in changing a bit the approach as described in the mentioned
+discussion at Github. That should unblock many paths to improve Agama in the near future.
+
+## A More Powerful User Interface for the Storage Proposal {#storage}
+
+The mentioned architectural changes are important for remote or unattended installation and also
+regarding integration of Agama into bigger solutions, but they may not be that visible for the
+casual user. That doesn't imply next months will be boring in the area of interactive installation.
+Quite the opposite, we plan many improvements in the Agama's proposal page that allows to tweak the
+storage configuration.
+
+The new interface aims to be easy enough for newcomers, as you can see in the following mock-up.
+But we know (open)SUSE users have big expectations in terms of customizing their setups. Thus,
+we updated the [document](https://github.com/openSUSE/agama/blob/master/doc/storage_ui.md) that
+describes how the new interface will work and all the possibilities it will offer for those who
+decide to go beyond the initial proposal. If you want to check whether your basic needs would be
+covered, don't hesitate to take a look to the document and the extended mock-ups included on it.
+
+{% include blog_img.md alt="Storage proposal" src="storage-mini.png" full_img="storage.png" %}
+
+If mock-ups and interface descriptions are not your cup of tea, worry not. We already started
+implementing some parts of the new interface, so you will be able to try the changes for real
+as they land incrementally on upcoming Agama prototypes.
+
+## openSUSE Conference in the horizon {#conference}
+
+If you look closely at the dates of both milestones described above, you will notice there is
+something happening right in the middle of both -
+[openSUSE Conference 2024](https://events.opensuse.org/conferences/oSC24)!
+
+
+year - take Agama to the next level in which it could even replace YaST for some scenarios and
+distributions.
+Is not only about replacing YaST but also about replacing the inst-sys. Help welcome.
+
+## Stay in touch {#closing}
+
+Your contributions and opinions are an important element for that. So don't hesitate to contact
+the YaST team at the [YaST Development mailing
+list](https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/yast-devel@lists.opensuse.org/), our `#yast`
+channel at [Libera.chat](https://libera.chat/) or the [Agama project at
+GitHub](https://github.com/openSUSE/agama).
+