Hi @stitch10925, and welcome to the community!
Happy New Year as well (although maybe a bit in advance depending on where you are).
Thanks for your feedback and taking the time to share your recommendations and ideas; that is always very appreciated and motivating for us! Thanks also for sharing your resolution on the other thread.
I personally completely agree with you on the points you’ve made. As you noticed, this is something that had been raised quite some time ago indeed, and I’m personally partly to blame on this one as I originally intended to tackle this and was hoping to have that done much sooner.
Thank you for detailing your ideas on how to resolve this; they actually do fit perfectly with all the discussions that happened around this. See for instance, the various GitHub issues we have to track this issue and the proposed ways to resolve it:
https://github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core/issues/2399#issue-1385168446
https://github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core/issues/2258#issue-791351389
https://github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core/issues/2064
As you can see in these discussions, we do plan on addressing this in a variety of ways:
- improved form validation to prevent the user from selecting the same share multiple times as this is currently not supported
- allow for increased flexibility in the selection of a share that would contain various sub-directories for each Rock-on config (and more)
- automatic creation of required shared during a Rock-on install wizard
What do you think about this approach? From your very helpful feedback, I think it seems to fit very well but thanks for letting us know more; we’re always very hungry for this kind of constructive feedback.
As you can see in these issues and the links therein, this is high on our list of features update and fixes. In case you would be curious and willing to have a look at that yourself, please find below our docs on how to do just that. Of course, we’re also always here to provide more info as needed and requested here.
https://rockstor.com/docs/contribute/contribute.html
I wanted to take the opportunity to provide some background here… my apologies in advance for veering a bit off-topic. @phillxnet (Rockstor’s maintainer) will be able to describe that better as needed, but in the past few years, we’ve had to spend most of our development effort on migrating our OS base (from CentOS to openSUSE) following the former’s deprecation of Btrfs support. This was a massive undertaking but has brought immeasurable benefits such as the first-class Btrfs support in openSUSE. Inherently, we’ve also had to make a lot of changes and improvements behind the scene, with a completely new ISO creation system (see GitHub - rockstor/rockstor-installer: The kiwi-ng configuration used to create Rockstor 4 'Built on openSUSE' installers.) to allow us to easily expand the number of systems for which we can build ISOs/images (we now support Raspberry Pi 4, for instance) and allow folks to create their own ISO as needed. @phillxnet also focused on building a very robust and flexible back-end for better testing and deployment of new releases. We thus have had to spend a lot of effort on strengthening/building a robust behind the scene base so that we could release much needed big changes more safely and thus more quickly. Thanks to this new base, we are now tackling our technical debt and we’ve already made substantial strides recently with a big update to our Django base and dependencies in the testing channel:
V4.5+ Testing Channel Changelog
@phillxnet has also been very very hard at work on modernizing our build process as we’ve been unfortunately hit by an unexpected emergency there. See the following for more details on the recent changes in since our last Testing channel release, for instance:
Again, thank you so much for your constructive feedback, and please let us know if you still have more questions. I hope I could at least provide some answers to your questions.