[rabbitmq-discuss] Thoughts from a new user

[David Wragg]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for your feedback.  Within the team, we carefully consider how we
should deploy our resources, and we welcome input that helps us
understand what our users think is important and why.

I'll take on a few of your comments below.  And regarding the website in
general, we're aware there is room for improvement, particularly from
the perspective of new users, and we are working on it.

Adam Nelson <adam at varud.com> writes:
> [...]
>  * This newsgroup format is terrible.  Please move to Google Groups.

You can browse the mailing list at
<http://groups.google.com/group/rabbitmq-discuss>, and through various
other mailing list to web gateways.  What makes this arrangement
terrible for you?  Not being able to post through them, or something
else?

>  * 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.

Could you explain more about how the code is very difficult to get at?
It can be browsed online through the standard Mercurial web interface at
<http://hg.rabbitmq.com/>, and the process of cloning the repos would be
very similar under github and bitbucket.  I appreciate that github and
bitbucket have some advantages, but what, from your perspective, are the
key ones that would apply to RabbitMQ?

>  * 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?

The principal documentation for set_permission is the rabbitmqctl man
page.  It's true that we only make the current versions of the man pages
available on the web site.  Would your problems have been avoided if we
published older versions of the man pages on the web site?

The web site content is maintained in Mercurial alongside our codebase.
This is convenient in a number of ways for us (e.g. being able to handle
code changes and the corresponding web site documentation changes in the
same workflow).  So it's conceivable that we could publish multiple
versions of the documentation from Mercurial on the web site.  This
would however require us to draw more of a distinction between reference
documentation and other types of information, the former tending to be
much more strongly version-specific.  But maybe that's a good idea
anyway.

>  * 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?

The rabbit team's development work is tracked in bugzilla, but that
bugzilla instance is not currently public.  We will make it public at
some point, though doing so is not quite as straightforward as it might
first seem.

Bugzilla might not be as modern or attractive as some of the issue
trackers you mention, but it is very featureful, and ours is integrated
into the rest of our development infrastructure.

David

-- 
David Wragg
Staff Engineer, RabbitMQ
SpringSource, a division of VMware