Uyuni: Forking Spacewalk with Salt and Containers

PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Members of a new open source community project called Uyuni announced today at openSUSE Conference that a fork of the open-source systems management solution Spacewalk is on its way.

The intention of the fork is to give new inspiration to a project that has been perceived as idling in recent years. Uyuni, however is already looking at increasing the implementation of a React web User Interface, translations, clients, container and Kubernetes integration. Uyuni is using Salt for configuration management, thereby inheriting its name: Uyuni refers to the world’s largest Salt flat, Salar de Uyuni in Southwest Bolivia.

Compatible and Innovative

“Uyuni has a vision for this open-source code and plans on growing its community and innovating the code beyond its current state in Spacewalk,” said Klaus Kämpf, SUSE’s Project Owner of SUSE Manager, who announced the fork. “Contributions for Spacewalk have decreased and focused more on maintenance and stabilization than on innovation.”

Uyuni will stay compatible, Kämpf adds as much as possible: “The Uyuni project will not break up compatibility on purpose, but that shall not prevent improvements for that reason.”

The current development plans are releasing a first version this summer, and then deciding on a release model together with the community.

Development will have automated testing using both the Open Build Service and Cluster Infrastructure.

A New Vision Sparking Contributions

Results from GitHub show the frequency of contributions have dwindled since 2014 and the current Spacewalk faq website states “Red Hat’s code contributions will decrease over time, as the focus shifts to maintenance and stabilization of the current set of features.”

A fact listed from the previous Spacewalk FAQ website, which has since been removed, stated, “As Red Hat’s participation ramps down, there will be an opportunity for the participation from other community members to ramp up. Someone (or several someones!) will need to take over some of the management role that currently rests on Red Hat.”

Uyuni community members decided to fork the project after extensive discussions with Red Hat about taking over the management role as stated above.

Spacewalk is an open source Linux systems management solution, currently available in version 2.8 as upstream community project for Red Hat Satellite 5. SUSE Manager is also based on Spacewalk and now plans on shifting to Uyuni as an upstream community.

“SUSE Manager’s development will be openly available to open-source community members for whatever contributions they would like to make to the Uyuni project,” Kämpf said.

Interested members can follow the project on https://github.com/uyuni-project, www.uyuni-project.org, or via Twitter at @UyuniProject. A presentation about Uyuni can be viewed on the openSUSETV YouTube channel or via the live stream for the conference at 9:30 a.m. UTC on https://streaming.media.ccc.de/osc18/.