We are integrating Cockpit into more and more places, like Foreman/Satellite or Insights. We have the host switcher, the flatpak and the ws/bastion containers. I.e. we are moving the focus away from installing cockpit-ws everywhere, and towards connecting to machines remotely over SSH.

For that it would be useful to drop the requirement that cockpit-bridge,system,podman,etc. has to be installed. If it is, things should work as before, but if not, then the flatpak and ws container should ship with a portable bridge and a set of standard pages (which should be sufficient to install more of them on demand) which will then be used instead.

The idea is to rewrite cockpit-bridge in Python. This can be rather efficient these days, with asyncio, and will also make the bridge code a lot easier to understand, maintain, and extend. This should mirror Ansible – only depend on core Python (and possibly some libraries which practically exist everywhere anyway). This rewrite should happen in steps, so that we can make measurable progress and get confident that this is a viable approach as soon as possible.

The other part of this is to teach cockpit-ws to serve pages from where it is running, instead from the (remote) bridge, and of course to send and start the python bridge to the remote side.