[Gluster-users] Disappointing documentation?

[John Mark Walker]

Hey guys - thanks for chiming in. As many of you have noted, we do need better documentation. There are a couple of things to note here. For one, we did create new docs that are 3.3-specific around most issues related to getting a cluster up and running - http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/QuickStart

As for the admin guide, I agree that having it in PDF (or HTML tarball) is not ideal, but well, there it is - http://www.gluster.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Gluster_File_System-3.3.0-Administration_Guide-en-US.pdf 

I also agree that it doesn't cover nearly enough of the issues that come up with many use cases, and we should definitely address that.

There is one other resource that no one has mentioned here yet, and that is the documentation listed under Red Hat Storage: https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs/Red_Hat_Storage/

We should flesh out docs on gluster.org more, and I'm hopeful of getting a new employee to do precisely that in the next couple of weeks. More on that soon, as in this month. 

And finally, there was a comment, I believe from jjulian, that we didn't backport enough patches to the current release cycle, and I think that's correct. This is one of the issues we plan to address this week at the dev summit tomorrow and Friday.

For 3.4, the goal is to have point releases at regular intervals with patches backported as we move forward. Obviously, we didn't do nearly enough of this for the 3.3 release cycle, and we're going to address that for this next release cycle.

So yes, it's fair to say that our docs are lacking, and we should take steps to address that. The thing is, whatever documentation strategy we adopt, we will need your help to really execute against a plan. If you're up for this, let's start a docs project on gluster.org and try to address the largest gaps.

Thanks!
John Mark
Gluster Community Lead