[Gluster-users] Working but some issues

[Joe Julian]

On 03/16/2015 10:24 PM, Melkor Lord wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 5:14 AM, Joe Julian <joe at julianfamily.org 
> <mailto:joe at julianfamily.org>> wrote:
>
>
>     I'll just address this one point in this email because it's such
>     an important one. This is not just an open-source project because
>     some company's developing a product and lets you have it for free,
>     this is an open-source *project*. We, the members of the
>     community, are as responsible for that problem as the folks that
>     know how to write in C; perhaps even more so.
>
>     I implore you to add your skills to improving the documentation.
>     You have the ability to see the documentation from a completely
>     different perspective from the folks that wrote the code. They may
>     not have documented --remote-host because they perhaps added it
>     for an internal reason and didn't expect users to use it. By
>     looking at it from a different perspective, you may see a need for
>     documentation and have the ability to implement it.
>
>
> I globally agree with your statement but there's a catch here, more of 
> a chicken-and-egg problem actually! In order to contribute to the 
> documentation or help other users, I must first be able to understand 
> the project myself! The mere documentation is missing at almost every 
> stage in GlusterFS and this is problematic. If I'm not able to put 
> GlusterFS at use understanding how it works and how it interacts 
> between all of its components, how am I supposed to explain it to 
> other people?

Good question. It took me months to figure all that out (with far less 
documentation than there is now) and even with pictures and arrows and 
8x10 glossies with a paragraph on the back of each one, people still 
have a hard time getting it. That's why so much effort has gone in to 
making a cli that does it all for you and doesn't require you to be a 
storage engineer to use it.

>
> I'm a sysadmin for over 2 decades and this is the first time I see 
> such a major project (GlusterFS is not a small HelloWorld app, it's 
> featureful, complex and envolves learning some concepts) with so 
> little documentation.

I'll split this out as I think you're unaware of the admin guide that's 
pretty detailed and is, at least, published with the source code (it may 
be on the gluster.org site somewhere, but I'm too tired right now to 
look). The source can readily be found on github 
<https://github.com/GlusterFS/glusterfs/tree/master/doc/admin-guide/en-US/markdown>.

> As I said before, I currently have *no* *clue* of all the options and 
> directives I can use in the main configuration file 
> /etc/glusterfs/glusterd.vol for example!

Right. There's nearly no need to mess with that except under the lesser 
circumstance that an unprivileged user needs access to the management port.

> There's only a "sample" configuration file with no further detail than 
> the classic "paste this into the file". Well no thank you ;) I won't 
> paste anything to any configuration file without understanding it 
> first and have a complete set of directives I can use. I have the 
> reponsability of having a running service and can't just "paste 
> things" as told :-)
>
> The only way I got GlusterFS to work is by searching BLOG posts and 
> this bad IMHO. The way I see how a project ecosystem should be managed 
> is like this : The devs should not only code but provide the full 
> information, documenting every single option and directive because no 
> other than them know the project better than they do! After that, the 
> ecosystem will grow by itself thanks to technical people that create 
> blog posts and articles to explain various creative ways of using the 
> software. The documentation from the devs does not have to be ultra 
> exhaustive explaining all possible use cases of course but at least, 
> document everything that needs to be documented to let other people 
> understand what they are dealing with.

That is the way it's done, btw. The developers are required to document 
their features before a release.

> Let me take 2 real world examples to get the general idea : Postfix 
> and NGinX! They are flexible enough to provide a quite large set of 
> use cases. Their documentation is impeccable from my point of view. 
> They provide an exhaustive documentation of their inner options like 
> this - http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html - and this - 
> http://nginx.org/en/docs/dirindex.html

Postfix, 16 years old, and hasn't always had very detailed 
documentation. Do you also remember when it was worse than sendmail's?

I could counter with any of the myriad of horrible documentation for 
some of the most popular software systems out there only to point out 
that Gluster's isn't all that bad by comparison to a great many of its 
peers.

>
> See, even if you forget all the HowTo's, articles and stuff, which are 
> great additions and bonuses, you can manage to get out of the woods 
> with these docs. That's exactly what I miss most in GlusterFS. There 
> are here and there options explained but often with no context.
>
> To the very specific case of "--remote-host" option, there's a design 
> problem in "gluster" command. Launching it without arguments and you 
> get a prompt and the command completion helps a bit. Now, try "gluster 
> -h" (or --help or -? or whatever) and you end up with "unrecognized 
> option --XXX". This is counter intuitive again. You can't experiment 
> by trial and error to figure out things when you're in the dark, 
> that's why I had to take a peek to the source code and find out the 
> existence of other options.

"gluster help" is pretty intuitive, imho, as is

     # gluster
     gluster> help

and the more detailed than any other software I can think of, "gluster 
volume set help" which has all the settings you can tweak in your volume 
along with their description equivalent to that postfix document.

> If you spend so much time trying to find information instead of 
> experimenting with a project, you may grow bored and leave.

Agreed, and that's something that the gluster.org web site's been 
failing at since the last 1 or 2 web site revamps.

> This would be bad because the lack of documentation may lead people to 
> avoid a project which could be really useful and good! GlusterFS 
> features exactly what I want for my usage, that's why I picked it up 
> but I didn't think it would be so hard to get proper documentation.
>
> For example, I can't get SSL to work with my 3.6.2 setup and there's 
> not a single bit of doc about it. There's only 
> http://blog.gluster.org/author/zbyszek/ but even after following the 
> necessary steps, I end up with a cryptic log entry "Cannot 
> authenticate client from 
> fs-00-22666-2015/03/16-11:42:54:167984-Data-client-0-0-0 3.6.2" and 
> repeated for all the replicas :-( I don't know what GlusterFS expects 
> in this case so I can't solve the problem for now.

https://github.com/GlusterFS/glusterfs/blob/master/doc/admin-guide/en-US/markdown/admin_ssl.md 
<-- not a blog

>
> I'll stop boring you now, you get the point ;) You can only explain 
> what you clearly understand and for now, this is still way too foogy 
> for me :)
>

Useful and eloquent perspectives and bits that infra is looking at 
rectifying. The web site is covered in too many words. The "Getting 
Started" entry has 13 sub-entries. That's not "getting started" that's 
"tl;dr". A new vision is being put together that will try to not just 
build a fancy web thingy, but will define goals such as usability, 
engagement, community interfacing, that kind of stuff - and measure the 
effectiveness of the changes that are made. It'll be change for the sake 
of improvement rather than just change for the sake of change.

> -- 
> Unix _IS_ user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.

But I still say you should still document things you find in the source 
if they aren't documented - since you're in there anyway. :-D
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