Open Stack

On 06/03/2014 10:59 AM, Tom Fifield wrote:
> 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.

Thanks a lot for these nice words Tom.

Indeed, I've been doing the Debian packaging of OpenStack nearly alone
(about 10 commits from contributors for this last Icehouse cycle), and a
lot of my work has been imported in Ubuntu as well (80% of my packaging
work is python module dependencies, and 80% of them were imported
without a single modification in Ubuntu, so all together, that's maybe
65% of my work imported in Ubuntu).

Note: I would accept more contributors! :)

>> 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

I agree with all of the above. But only up to the point (which you
aren't explicitly making) that we can't make the guide both easy, and
full of explanations. That's what I've been trying to do, but like
everything, it shall be perfected so we reach our goals.

After reading you, what I believe we should care, is that there's a
correct learning curve for our users. They must understand what they are
doing, while keeping things easy. Though there is no opposition between
having things easy (and in the Debian case, with a kind of GUI, with
automation so that it's less error prone), and making things
understandable in depth.

I just had a quick look to what we have currently, and indeed, only the
[keystone_authtoken] section explicitly tells what directive are going
to be edited automatically. I will add some more explanations in the
other sections to make it more explicit, then will go through each
service to do the same.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)