[Sheepdog] Next version and user documentation

[David Douard]

On 04/05/2012 10:11, Matthew Law wrote:
> Also,
> 
> Unless someone is working on it already, I would like to try and build
> packages of the next release for debian.  I've never done it before (not
> publicly anyway) so I don't know what it really involves (and I would
> welcome help too) but it would certainly help my own use of sheepdog.

Same here. I may find some time to help on this task. I believe that the
task (beside writing more doc) may not be that big since debian and
ubuntu already package sheepdog (old versions however, 0.2.3 for ubuntu
and 0.2.4 for debian).

> I agree that there is so much more to sheepdog than the website indicates.
>  Perhaps we could pool efforts together to make better documentation
> (especially for newcomers) and 

Preparing a new official version (being 0.3.1 or 0.4.0) is a good
occasion for writing this missing doc.

> introduce a sheepdog-discuss list too for
> the non-developer audience? - just my thoughts as a user/observer.

+1, the current list is mainly used for code review, so more general
discussions can be "lost" there. Splitting the list is IMHO a requirement.

> 
> On an unrelated note, I noticed this yesterday which claims ElasticHosts
> have been using sheepdog in production for some time:
> 
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/elastichosts_managed_services_cloud/

This kind of annoucement should be advertised more. I for myself still
not sure I want to use sheepdog in a production environment, because I
still have trouble resuming from "critical" situations, or some
unhandled "instabilities" due to misuse (eg. running the same "collie
vdi create" command from several hosts from cssh sessions make sheep
unresponsive, etc.)

Seeing sheepdog used in prod environments by others can help to be more
confident, for sure.

And having a recent version available as deb packages would also be a
strong argument helping me decide to use it on my openstack cluster...

David


> 
> Matt.
> 
> On Fri, May 4, 2012 8:33 am, David Douard wrote:
>> On 26/04/2012 11:21, Liu Yuan wrote:
>>> On 04/26/2012 03:12 PM, David Douard wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> there has been a while since the publication of version 0.3.0. Are you
>>>> planning an official release soon? If so, will there be a
>>>> changelog/what's new documentation?
>>>>
>>>> If so, there is IMHO a huge need for more documentation (as always, I
>>>> know). The README is a nice quickstart guide, but there is no real user
>>>> or admin documentation answering things like:
>>>>
>>>> - how do I configure sheepdog? (and what can be configured?),
>>>> - what are the available stores? How do I choose/configure a backend
>>>> store? should I consider using farm? how?
>>>> - and most important: how do I recover from critical situations? what
>>>> to
>>>> be aware of when a critical situation occurs? etc.
>>>>
>>>> Following the mailing list for a little while, I've noticed that some
>>>> of
>>>> the missing informations can be found in the mailing list.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> So, are you planning an official release soon? And do you plan to
>>>> improve user documentation?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Hi David,
>>> 	Thanks for your dedicated work on sheepdog. Yes, I think we should
>>> provide at least a user guide in 'doc' directory along with source code.
>>> I'll patch up a new file dedicated for it, though it might be incomplete
>>> with biased viewpoint, then anyone can patch upon it for improvement.
>>>
>>> 	For official release, I guess Kazum will give a better and
>>> authoritative answer.
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Any news on some release plan?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> David
>>
>>
>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Yuan
>>
>> --
>> sheepdog mailing list
>> sheepdog at lists.wpkg.org
>> http://lists.wpkg.org/mailman/listinfo/sheepdog
>>
> 

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: david_douard.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 246 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.wpkg.org/pipermail/sheepdog/attachments/20120504/225ddde8/attachment-0003.vcf>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 262 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wpkg.org/pipermail/sheepdog/attachments/20120504/225ddde8/attachment-0002.sig>