Re: [Gluster-devel] Documentation expectations for 3.5 release

[Joe Julian]

Like I always say, "I'm just a user." I'm happy when my input is considered but I'm not a developer so I know that my -1 doesn't really count.

I'm kind of surprised it's this hard and that in the week this has been discussed as a release requirement that it didn't just get done. Now we're saying that it can't get done in a reasonable amount of time so let's put it off while we start the development cycle for 3.6 and somehow more time can be made this time to go back and document as a 3.5.1 release than has in the past.

I agree documentation is a chore. You guys are brilliant and, as I do with my own challenges, want to move on to the next one. I understand that emotion. I also know that the longer it's put off the more you want to put it off. Just the idea of breaking your current train of thought to shift gears and go back to that thing you finished weeks ago is stressful and daunting. 

The only way I can do it is to bite the bullet and just do it. Get it over with so it's no longer dangling over your head. 

I hope you understand that I'm not adversarial about this. I have invested a lot of my own time in this project to and take pride in my involvement. I want this to be the best damn SDS in the industry and part of that is documentation. When people talk shit about Gluster the only thing I can't argue on merit is complaints about documentation. I want to be able to proudly tell people they are full of it when they complain.

The things I've documented in my blog came from scratch. I knew, at times, nothing at all about what I was writing when I started. I had to read code and test and debug. None of them took me more than three days and that's in my off-hours. 

Please get the documentation done.

On April 15, 2014 2:02:00 PM PDT, John Mark Walker <address@hidden> wrote:

Agreed. Let's push it out and bake in the doc process for the next release.

Justin - you are in charge of defining the release requirements for the follow-up docs release.

Can we agree on this? Let's make this release available by tomorrow so Vijay and I can talk about the just-released 3.5.

-JM

On Apr 15, 2014 1:58 PM, "Jeff Darcy" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Is there _actual pressure_ from a defined source (who I can speak to), or
> is it something such as "we're really overdue already", etc?

|
That's setting the bar a bit high, don't you think?  Those of us at
Summit have all had the dubious pleasure of telling users that the
feature they asked about isn't available in a release yet.  Should we
follow up that bad news by asking them to go out of their way to contact
some random guy who's not there, or sign a statement spelling out
exactly what effect lack of that feature had on their decision not to
deploy GlusterFS?  Should you provide similar proof regarding your
claims about lack of documentation?  Of course not.

We all get that poor documentation hurts the project.  Some of us have
even tried to do something about that.  Most of us also realize that
releases dragging on too long *also* hurt the project in a variety of
ways.  Having to maintain an active current-release branch in addition
to master is a drag on development.  Users are ill served by being
unable to get fixes for actual bugs in easily consumable form.  We're
dealing with a tradeoff here, not something where one side gets to put
on a white hat and jam the black hat on somebody else.

I'm deliberately not taking a position on whether or not we should
release with the documentation in its current state.  All I'm saying
is that making inequitable demands of one another, or trying to
portray one another as failing to appreciate users' needs, hurts
the project even more than either poor documentation or late
releases.  That's an issue on which I *am* willing to take a stand.

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