[rabbitmq-discuss] Thoughts from a new user (two months later)

[Marek Majkowski]

Adam,

Although you've presented your suggestions more than
two monts ago, I'd like to share my thoughts now.

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 22:55, Adam Nelson <adam at varud.com> wrote:
> I've been using RabbitMQ for 2 months now and I figured I would share my
> experiences.
>
> == Background ==
>
> I'm using RabbitMQ because Celery recommends it.  If Celery recommended
> something else, I would have used that.  I'm just pointing that out because
> sometimes core services forget that people often use them because a
> particular library favors that implementation.  It's important to take care
> of the downstream libraries, especially when you're using an open protocol
> like AMQP.
>
> == Comments so Far ==
>
> I think RabbitMQ is awesome and has done really well so far for me.  It's
> been very fast (only marginally important for me) and very stable (much,
> much more important for me).  Here's my constructive criticism (i.e. things
> that can be addressed easily IMHO).
>
>  * This newsgroup format is terrible.  Please move to Google Groups.

There is a copy of our list on GG, but the full migration won't happen.
I'm fairly happy with mailman, although I do agree that there is
a place for improvement.

>  * The code is very difficult to get at.  Please move to Github (or
> BitBucket).  I see that you're using Mercurial already, so BitBucket is the
> obvious choice.  I think GitHub is way more feature rich but if you're not
> willing to move to Git, that won't work of course.

The code is now mirrored on github.

>  * The documentation is not version-specific.  This has caused me enormous
> problems (specifically with set-permissions, which is why I'm in the mode to
> write this message at all).  Please move to a platform that supports
> versioned documentation better.  I don't know the best solution to this
> exactly - maybe Sphinx or just a wiki with a url structure that supports
> multiple versions?

I do understand your point, but that's not something top-priority IMO.
We always strongly encourage to upgrade to the newest version,
and we want to focus on improving our latest version.

>  * Where are the open tickets?  It appears that all bugs are going through
> the mailing list - it's really hard on the users to not have an
> easy-to-search ticket system.  Launchpad could work or BitBucket's issue
> system, or Redmine, or Trac?

Yeah, I'd love to have open our bugtracker, but apparently, that's pretty hard.
We're still looking for a way how to do it.

>  * The site itself needs a fresh look.  I know MongoDB is funded, but
> there's an example of a great site for this type of thing:
> http://www.mongodb.org/ .

Would you like to volunteer? I'm much better at writing erlang
than doing websites.

>  * Outdated stuff should be taken down or have a disclaimer on it.  For
> instance the ec2 page: http://www.rabbitmq.com/ec2.html has images for
> Karmic Koala.  While that was great last year, it's really time to have a
> Lucid ec2 images available - or nothing at all.  A Lucid image, because it
> is long term, could be up for a year or two and it would be ok.

Ec2 page has been fixed, I hope.

>  * Please don't tell Mac users to use MacPorts:
> http://www.rabbitmq.com/macports.html It's time to move them to HomeBrew at
> http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

We're making some slow progress on that front.

>  * Please be more descriptive about how to set up an environment with tools
> like Alice and Wonderland.  These appear to be great assets to RabbitMQ, but
> are hidden in the dense 'Getting Started' page:
> http://www.rabbitmq.com/how.html .  All the links from a Getting Started
> page should take no longer than 1 hour to read.  Check out Django's one hour
> intro here: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/  .  The
> first link on RabbitMQ's Getting Started page goes to this Alexis Richardson
> talk -
> http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/erlang/alexis-richardson-introduction-to-rabbitmq
> .  While the content is great, it's geared towards the intermediate user,
> not a beginner just getting started.  Also, having dynamic delicious
> searches is fine for an appendix maybe, but not the first page for people
> getting started.

We've introduced tutorials, and we'll continue to improve. Feedback is welcome.

Cheers,
    Marek Majkowski