On 05/18/2011 01:04 PM, Jeff Darcy wrote:
On 05/18/2011 11:09 AM, Burnash, James wrote:

[...]

As the leader for a project based on GlusterFS, I'm also very sensitive
to the stability issue. It is a bit disappointing when every major
release seems to be marked by significant regressions in existing
functionality. It's particular worrying when even community leaders and
distro packagers report serious problems and those take a long time to
resolve. I'd put you in that category, James, along with JoeJulian and
daMaestro just with respect to the 3.1.4 and 3.2 releases. Free or paid,
that's not a nice thing to do to your marquee users, and you're the kind
of people whose interest and support we can hardly afford to lose.  Even
I've been forced to take a second look at alternatives, and I'm just
about the biggest booster Gluster has who's not on their payroll.

Us as well ... we have a product that uses it as its base, so we are obviously strong proponents of it.

So how do we deal with these issues *constructively*? Not by
characterizing every release since 2.0.9 as "bogus" that's for sure.

Agreed. Lets not get on this sort of track. I expect issues with early revs, and I expect things to improve with each rev. When we find bugs we do our best to submit them to bugs.gluster.com. I'd suggest everyone get an account there, and submit your bugs. Especially if you have a replicator.

[...]

The problem I do see, and I do agree with others who've spoken out here,
is primarily one of communication. It's a bit frustrating to see dozens
of geosync/marker/quota patches fly by while a report of a serious bug
isn't even *assigned* (let alone worked on as far as anyone can tell)
for days or even weeks. I can only imagine how it must be for the people
whose filesystems have been totally down for that long, whose bosses are
breathing down their necks and pointedly suggesting that a technology
switch might be in order. We can all help by making sure our bugs are
actually filed on bugs.gluster.com - not just mentioned here or on IRC -

+1 Folks, get an account there, and report problems, even if you haven't paid for support.

Second, if you haven't paid for support, and you are using it in a production environment to either make money or support your mission, please, help Gluster there as well. They aren't doing this project for their own health, they need to show a demand for this in market from paying customers (just like Redhat, and every other company).

and by doing our part to provide the developers with the information
they need to reproduce or fix problems. We can help by actually testing
pre-release versions, particularly if our configurations/workloads are
likely to represent known gaps in Gluster's own test coverage. The devs
can help by marking bugs' status/assignment, severity/priority, and
found/fixed versions more consistently. The regression patterns in the
last few releases clearly indicate that more tests are needed in certain
areas such as RDMA and upgrades with existing data.

The key here is that if we want things to change we all need to make it
happen. We can't tell Gluster how to run their business, which includes
how they decide on features or how they allocate resources to new
features vs. bug fixes, but as a community we can give them clear and
unambiguous information about what is holding back more widespread
adoption. It used to be manageability; now it's bugs. We need to be as
specific as we possibly can about which bugs or shortcomings matter to
us, not just vague "it doesn't work" or "it's slow" or "it's not POSIX
enough" kinds of stuff, so that a concrete plan can be made to improve
the situation.


--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics Inc.
email: [email protected]
web  : http://scalableinformatics.com
       http://scalableinformatics.com/sicluster
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
fax  : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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