Request for Katello refactoring - Move angular code to webpack

Hello all,

While brainstorming ways to speed up our development environment, it occurred to me that we are still using the rails asset pipeline for our angular code (in engines/bastion_katello). We have added a webpack server in the recent years mostly for the React side of things, but it should be able to handle our angular code as well.

I tested this out and it appears to significantly speed up our dev environment. As most of the Katello devs know, our development environment can be quite sluggish at times, even with Rail’s assets_debug option turned off. I think any improvement in this area would be very beneficial to keeping us productive (and maybe help our blood pressure too?). This also moves most of our javascript code to webpack.

I’m not sure if I’m missing larger implications of a change like this, such as how assets are handled in production, but I created a WIP PR and would like to get a conversation started on the change.

Please test this out and let me know what you think, curious to hear everyone’s thoughts

https://github.com/Katello/katello/pull/7753

John asked me to give this a test, and so I did. I happened to have a particularly slow dev box in terms of UI performance and this sped it up nicely. Curious if there is a reason to not move this to webpack - build aspects aside with asset compilation, etc.

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Given the PR exists, I’ll post my questions there. I generally don’t see an issue with it, however, we do need to consider some nuances.