Open Stack

Thomas,

I for one very much appreciate the enormous amount of effort you have 
put in to make OpenStack usable for debian. I'm not sure everyone in the 
docs team knows, but Thomas is also the lead (perhaps only?) packager of 
OpenStack for debian. He's been constantly helping fight frustrating 
battles that improve OpenStack, and that improve packaging and 
eas-of-install for all distributions as a result.


Regarding the current discussion, I just want to pull out one specific 
remark - a remark that I stress is not at all related to debian or 
debconf. I want to do this because it's based on an assumption that we 
made, and reverted some time ago:

> Obviously (but let's state it anyway), our users will prefer something
> guided, step by step, where no manual edition of config file is
> necessary...

This actually turns out not to be the case for our readers.

A brief run-down of history: we originally had two install guides. One 
was "basic", and people didn't like it because they didn't learn any of 
the "why" steps were what they were as they were installing. One was 
"comprehensive", and people complained there was too much guidance and 
it was laborious to follow.

The current install guide is our best attempt at a happy medium.

The set of users who want less manual editing typically want zero manual 
editing. They turn to a fully opinionated installer where they have to 
make no choices at all to get something running - in our case typically 
devstack.

After this experience, when they want to do a "real" install, they want 
to find out that little bit of the "why" as they do so - enough that 
they can then put it into their automated configuration management tool 
of choice later. This is the current underlying guiding principle of the 
install guide as I see it.

Regards,


Tom