[mgmt] News

[James]

It has been a bit quiet on the mailing list lately, so here's a quick
update with some recent news and happenings.

* I left Red Hat. There's a blog post about this here:
https://purpleidea.com/blog/2018/04/04/leaving-redhat/
TL;DR: I'll be continuing the work on mgmt, but funded from my personal
savings.

I have a patreon if you or your company would like to donate:
https://www.patreon.com/purpleidea

* I merged a giant refactor/rewrite of the resource engine. That's in
git master. I missed a small bug/race which causes intermittent
failures when shutting down a cluster. I got unmotivated working on the
fix, and since it's not in a release, I postponed that work to focus on
some other parts that I wanted to get merged. As a result, the next
release will be another big one.

* I've been working on adding important features to the language.
Classes (a parameterized grouping construct) was missing, and now
exists in git master! User defined functions were also missing, and I'm
working on that now.

* A large etcd rewrite has been ongoing. Not sure when it will be
ready.

* I started work on turning the `remote execution` feature into a
resource. That actually caused me to block and switch to working on the
etcd rewrite which is needed to support some of the fun stuff for this
resource.

* I'm starting to think about the layout and design for "modules".
Here's the idea... Modules will contain an arbitrary number of
variables, user defined classes, and functions which other code can
access after using an `import` statement. You'll probably also be
allowed to access any associated data that might normally be part of a
code base. This might include files such as standalone templates.

All of this code and the modules will need to have some sort of
directory structure. I've not settled on what that should look like,
which is why I'm soliciting ideas.

Eg: How should the code be laid out across files and directories?
Should nesting represent something? Should files and templates be in a
separate directory or be stored alongside the .mcl files? Etc... Send
me your ideas!

* Lastly, I'm thinking about offering some consulting/training sessions
for organizations looking to adopt mgmt. It's still early, but I think
we're in the final stretch before we're feature complete, and it would
be great to quietly put out some feelers to know if anyone is
interested. This would give me some time to prepare training material,
and schedule sessions. If you're interested, please drop me an email
off-list or via this encrypted form: https://purpleidea.com/contact/

Thanks!
James
@purpleidea
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