[Gluster-devel] Documentation expectations for 3.5 release

[Jeff Darcy]

> 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.