Hi, Bill, Thanks for sharing your experience. Yes, our documentation can definitely be improved. As for your suggestion, I have
1. modified the producer example wiki ( https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/0.8.0+Producer+Example) to fix Partitioner. 2. marked the quickstart wiki page as obsolete. 3. filed KAFKA-1619 to fix the perf jar (the perf dir can actually be removed). As for signing during build, you can bypass it by specifying "-x signArchives", which is described in README.md. Let me know if this needs to be explicitly specified in any existing documentation. Thanks, Jun On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 5:53 AM, Bill de hÓra <b...@dehora.net> wrote: > 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 >
