I am personally completely against splitting the list. It will basically
force everyone to be in the two lists, and even worse, those with a
question that does not get an answer, will try with the second list.
Besides, when you have a question, how do you know if it's a difficult
one? Sometimes you just hit a bug when you are newby, and sometimes you
are missing a comma when you are expert.
Then, for people like me that are learning, it is very useful to see all
those questions getting answer, you learn really a lot from other's
questions.
I would really focus on the documentation. Maybe going through it,
checking which paragraphs are more confusing or hide not-so-easy
concepts or common misconceptions, and back up with better real-life
examples, together with a FAQ, would probably remove 30% of the
questions there are here.
Thanks for this list!
Pablo
On 04/03/2012 07:56 AM, Brian Gupta wrote:
Michael,
Would you guys consider standing up a shapado instance?
http://shapado.com/ (It's basically an FLOSS clone of stackoverflow,
and is great for Q&A type stuff.) You could stand it up as
ask.puppetlabs.com <http://ask.puppetlabs.com>, and point new users
there for questions. One of the big issues of puppet-users, is simple
the volume of emails that are blasted into ones inbox. (Ignoring the
diverse nature of the various discussions.) In addition, I have a
sense that IRC and mailing lists are a bit old-school, and can be
intimidating to new users.
Personally, I don't love mailing lists, in that I don't want to have
to subscribe to EVERYTHING, to get the answer to a single question.
I'd also like to address Scott's critique of FAQs. I think that no
matter how good and complete the documentation, there will be
frequently asked questions. It's just the nature of the beast.
Thanks,
Brian
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Michael Stahnke
<stah...@puppetlabs.com <mailto:stah...@puppetlabs.com>> wrote:
Hey, we've been having some mailing list discussion on and off inside
of Puppet Labs too. Obviously we have a large community that we are
trying to appeal to, and we keep doing our best to create the
experience for the user-base.
Breaking the users list into two lists has its pros and cons.
Pros:
* Less code fragments in emails
* Advanced users not bogged down with new user questions
Cons:
* Fragmentation of the user-base
* Who will monitor/answer questions on a new user list?
* New people may not learn from more experienced people, because the
more experienced users may not subscribe to the new-users list
What I really think we need, is a way to provide knowledge to new
users in an efficient (and non fragmented) way. In the past we had a
horrible problem with documentation all over the place, wiki issues,
blogs from everybody and their brother, etc. Today, we have narrowed
those problems with the Learning Puppet series.
(http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning/), and lots of other
documentation improvements on docs.puppetlabs.com
<http://docs.puppetlabs.com>.
The points about FAQ make complete sense. We'd like to address this
with proper documentation and some other online presence that will be
rolled out in the in the next quarter or so.
As an interrum, could we have a wiki page where we place questions
that get asked frequently and have no (or incomplete) associated
documentation?
http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/Frequent_Questions_Without_Answers
We also hope that IRC is helpful and remains helpful. I don't often
see RTFM comments coming out in #puppet. When I do, it's quite often
because their exact question was already answered, with citations, and
the user still didn't read it. Also in this thread somebody mentioned
helping those willing to help themselves. That's a fair statement,
but we really want to make this an accepting community to make
everybody better at their workloads with Puppet.
I hope I've attempted to answer some of the concerns. I am totally
willing to revisit this in 90 days or so if the community thinks we
should be handling this differently.
This is also by no means designed to close this discussion, so please
weigh in if you have opinions.
Michael Stahnke
Community Manager
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Mister IT Guru
<misteritg...@gmx.com <mailto:misteritg...@gmx.com>> wrote:
> Good Evening Guys,
>
> Let me start by saying that I really admire how far puppet has
come in the last year or so, with the launch of the Enterprise
version, Puppet Forge and the other innovations from within Puppet
Labs, and in particular the community participation. I love the
mailing list, even though I've been lurking for over a year. It's
this "inner shame" that compels me to raise this issue. I
apologise if this is not the place to mention this, but hey,
you've already got this far, so keep reading!
>
> I get stage fright looking at some of the "code fragments" that
people post to the list and then say "This is how far I've got and
I'm trying to do X" where X is something pretty complex/unique
doesn't quite seem like best practice or something that you'll
find on a general use linux box. While I have no problem or even
issue with this, the problem I find is that when I tell my admin
geek friends about puppet, they go to google and switch off when
they see what they view as "buckets of work" to just get started.
We have a lot of Puppet users on Mac, BSD, and now Windows too, so
it's not just Linux.
>
> In a nutshell the perception and feedback I get and I feel this
myself, is that the competency level of those whose regularly
participate in this list, and in other internet forums may just be
a bit too good. I feel as if puppet is lacking a sort of "nursery
area". After all, everyone here is already a 'professional' or so
we like to think!
>
> Would it be a good idea to have a puppet beginners list, where
people can post dumb questions, and maybe have some patient people
posting links to blog entries, you tube videos (something which I
noticed is lacking for puppet, again making it hard for me to
evangelise about it, to even get clients to look at it), and get
up to speed with you guys.
>
> I would like a Puppet Nursery - Or failing that, can we get a
puppet advance list? :)
>
> I'm just saying - It worked for a different project, that's part
of how ubuntu started to take over the world, it just became
accessible to the casual user. Well, there are a bucket load of
causal professional linux admins, who I fear may dismiss taking up
puppet because they just can't get the time together to learn or
keep up with those who puppet 24/7
>
> It's just an observation, with a request thrown in - If I
annoyed you, upset you, hurt your ego or made you feel bad in any
way, I'm sorry. If you wish to take it up with me personally, no
problem, have your people call my people, and we'll set up the
meet - I'm a big guy so bring backup! (just kidding, love peace
and all that!) - I'm hoping to stimulate some conversation and
debate - how can puppet be one of the first thoughts in the mind
of someone who wants to manage from a 2 to 2 thousands machines? -
Reach a critical mass amount casual users? Worked for Facebook,
Twitter - not so much for Nokia but you get the point.
>
> SO! Techie Admin Genius People!! Let's Debate
>
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