Hi,
On twitter recently [1] I said I'd send on a list of things that made
getting 0.8 setup for a quick bench awkward. Individually they're all
minor and I apologize if this seem like nitpicking. But in sum, getting
through them was a bit of a chore; it took maybe just short of a couple
of hours and a strong cup of coffee get to log stream nirvana :)
Anyway, here's a list of things that tripped me up -
- It seems like the 0.8 docs are in transition, or old docs have been
abandoned. There is some information on cwiki.apache.org and some on
kafka.apache.org. When I searched it was hit and miss which I landed on.
- The quickstart on cwiki.apache.org looks very wrong. It still shows
sbt, but the project builds with gradle, the kafka-create-topic.sh
params are wrong, the producer example's Partitioner has a generic param
but Partitioner in the code doesn't have one, etc.
- Some stuff on kafka.apache org also looked wrong, eg creating
topics in https://kafka.apache.org/08/quickstart.html, broken link to
http://kafka.apache.org/projects.html, the link back to the code example
on cwiki.
- The Kafka 0.8 binaries ship with perf scripts, but not perf lib.
- A download for the perf lib wasn't anywhere I could see on the site
(http://kafka.apache.org/downloads.html) - you'd have to know to search
maven, or checkout Kafka and build it, and then put the jar into the lib
area.
- The project doesn't work/build with java 8 afaict, or didn't for
me; there didn't seem to be a way to know that in advance.
- The project trunk failed to build due to some signing/license
checks (the diff I used to get things to build is here:
https://gist.github.com/dehora/7e3c0bd75bb2b5d87557).
- The javaapi coverage is partial. Initially I wasn't sure if I had
failed to import things from the right package before realizing I was
looking at bad docs.
- The messages flag on the perf script is required but not marked as
required.
In terms of what might help others, and I'd be happy to pitch in if
people thought they would make things easier, here's another list -
- Have working code examples for 0.8, and mention StringEncoder in
the docs for serializer.class.
- Delete wrong information. It seems like there should be just one
doc/wiki site and that cwiki.apache.org could be removed or marked dead
in big friendly letters.
- Ship the perf jar with the binary, or, remove the perf scripts and
create a separate perf distributable.
- Make the build work out of the box. It seems like the lic/singing
checks are for publication rather than local dev. (I haven't tried the
instructions to setup in an IDE yet).
Bill
[1] https://twitter.com/dehora/status/503207180544520193
