[Gluster-users] gluster 3.2.0 - totally broken?

[Joe Landman]

On 05/18/2011 01:04 PM, Jeff Darcy wrote:
> On 05/18/2011 11:09 AM, Burnash, James wrote:

[...]

> As the leader for a project based on GlusterFS, I'm also very sensitive
> to the stability issue. It is a bit disappointing when every major
> release seems to be marked by significant regressions in existing
> functionality. It's particular worrying when even community leaders and
> distro packagers report serious problems and those take a long time to
> resolve. I'd put you in that category, James, along with JoeJulian and
> daMaestro just with respect to the 3.1.4 and 3.2 releases. Free or paid,
> that's not a nice thing to do to your marquee users, and you're the kind
> of people whose interest and support we can hardly afford to lose.  Even
> I've been forced to take a second look at alternatives, and I'm just
> about the biggest booster Gluster has who's not on their payroll.

Us as well ... we have a product that uses it as its base, so we are 
obviously strong proponents of it.

> So how do we deal with these issues *constructively*? Not by
> characterizing every release since 2.0.9 as "bogus" that's for sure.

Agreed.  Lets not get on this sort of track.  I expect issues with early 
revs, and I expect things to improve with each rev.  When we find bugs 
we do our best to submit them to bugs.gluster.com.  I'd suggest everyone 
get an account there, and submit your bugs.  Especially if you have a 
replicator.

[...]

> The problem I do see, and I do agree with others who've spoken out here,
> is primarily one of communication. It's a bit frustrating to see dozens
> of geosync/marker/quota patches fly by while a report of a serious bug
> isn't even *assigned* (let alone worked on as far as anyone can tell)
> for days or even weeks. I can only imagine how it must be for the people
> whose filesystems have been totally down for that long, whose bosses are
> breathing down their necks and pointedly suggesting that a technology
> switch might be in order. We can all help by making sure our bugs are
> actually filed on bugs.gluster.com - not just mentioned here or on IRC -

+1  Folks, get an account there, and report problems, even if you 
haven't paid for support.

Second, if you haven't paid for support, and you are using it in a 
production environment to either make money or support your mission, 
please, help Gluster there as well.  They aren't doing this project for 
their own health, they need to show a demand for this in market from 
paying customers (just like Redhat, and every other company).

> and by doing our part to provide the developers with the information
> they need to reproduce or fix problems. We can help by actually testing
> pre-release versions, particularly if our configurations/workloads are
> likely to represent known gaps in Gluster's own test coverage. The devs
> can help by marking bugs' status/assignment, severity/priority, and
> found/fixed versions more consistently. The regression patterns in the
> last few releases clearly indicate that more tests are needed in certain
> areas such as RDMA and upgrades with existing data.
>
> The key here is that if we want things to change we all need to make it
> happen. We can't tell Gluster how to run their business, which includes
> how they decide on features or how they allocate resources to new
> features vs. bug fixes, but as a community we can give them clear and
> unambiguous information about what is holding back more widespread
> adoption. It used to be manageability; now it's bugs. We need to be as
> specific as we possibly can about which bugs or shortcomings matter to
> us, not just vague "it doesn't work" or "it's slow" or "it's not POSIX
> enough" kinds of stuff, so that a concrete plan can be made to improve
> the situation.


-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics Inc.
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web  : http://scalableinformatics.com
        http://scalableinformatics.com/sicluster
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
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