Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
On 2 Apr 2012, at 10:12, Craig Dunn wrote: Would it be a good idea to have a puppet beginners list, where people can post dumb questions, and maybe have some patient people posting links [snip] Without wanting to pigeon hole or stereotype anyone, my experience from the IRC channel in particular is that dumb questions that get asked often show that the poster has not read through the online documentation and has jumped straight into the community support channels instead. No-one minds helping a struggling beginner, but the old him who helps himself saying applies and I think for most people, if they genuinely read the excellent language guide properly they would answer the majority of beginner questions on their own. Some people take offense when told on IRC to RTFM, or given an anchor link to the docs in response to a question, but it simply is the best source of information to their issues. Providing a beginners mailing list IMO would only encourage people to bypass the docs even more. 2p/w :) Craig -- Craig Dunn | http://www.craigdunn.org Yahoo/Skype: craigrdunn | Twitter: @crayfishX Good Evening Craig, and thanks for your reply! I appreciate your comments, but having reflected more on the point Providing a beginners mailing list IMO would only encourage people to bypass the docs even more While this may be true, the number of people searching, finding links via twitter, or having a casual intrest, is only going to go up. And the docs are written from the perspective of a technical manual. Docs are great and I applaud the effort that goes into it. But it's still just documentation. When your in school, college, university, insert place of education here, a massive text book is not dropped in your lap on day one, and then your sent off into the world. Every FOSS project pretty much comes with documentation these days - yet we have support forums. The same for a lot of technical products that are sold in our shops, but everyone has support lines. If documentation worked, most of us will be out of work. I think the community aspect is the key. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
+1 For Dens idea. I use the stack exchange and a few related linked sites, and it's awesome! Google it, sign up, find some puppet questions that have been posted there. You guys might be able to help :) On 3 Apr 2012, at 06:53, Denmat wrote: How about a 'serverfault' or 'stackoverflow' or the like site? One of the issues I find is that previous answers are lost in mail lists and hard to search for. IRC isn't much help for searching previous answers either. -1 for separate lists. Den On 03/04/2012, at 14:30, Michael Stahnke stah...@puppetlabs.com wrote: Hey, we've been having some mailing list discussion on and off inside of Puppet Labs too. Obviously we have a large community that we are trying to appeal to, and we keep doing our best to create the experience for the user-base. Breaking the users list into two lists has its pros and cons. Pros: * Less code fragments in emails * Advanced users not bogged down with new user questions Cons: * Fragmentation of the user-base * Who will monitor/answer questions on a new user list? * New people may not learn from more experienced people, because the more experienced users may not subscribe to the new-users list What I really think we need, is a way to provide knowledge to new users in an efficient (and non fragmented) way. In the past we had a horrible problem with documentation all over the place, wiki issues, blogs from everybody and their brother, etc. Today, we have narrowed those problems with the Learning Puppet series. (http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning/), and lots of other documentation improvements on docs.puppetlabs.com. The points about FAQ make complete sense. We'd like to address this with proper documentation and some other online presence that will be rolled out in the in the next quarter or so. As an interrum, could we have a wiki page where we place questions that get asked frequently and have no (or incomplete) associated documentation? http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/Frequent_Questions_Without_Answers We also hope that IRC is helpful and remains helpful. I don't often see RTFM comments coming out in #puppet. When I do, it's quite often because their exact question was already answered, with citations, and the user still didn't read it. Also in this thread somebody mentioned helping those willing to help themselves. That's a fair statement, but we really want to make this an accepting community to make everybody better at their workloads with Puppet. I hope I've attempted to answer some of the concerns. I am totally willing to revisit this in 90 days or so if the community thinks we should be handling this differently. This is also by no means designed to close this discussion, so please weigh in if you have opinions. Michael Stahnke Community Manager On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Mister IT Guru misteritg...@gmx.com wrote: Good Evening Guys, Let me start by saying that I really admire how far puppet has come in the last year or so, with the launch of the Enterprise version, Puppet Forge and the other innovations from within Puppet Labs, and in particular the community participation. I love the mailing list, even though I've been lurking for over a year. It's this inner shame that compels me to raise this issue. I apologise if this is not the place to mention this, but hey, you've already got this far, so keep reading! I get stage fright looking at some of the code fragments that people post to the list and then say This is how far I've got and I'm trying to do X where X is something pretty complex/unique doesn't quite seem like best practice or something that you'll find on a general use linux box. While I have no problem or even issue with this, the problem I find is that when I tell my admin geek friends about puppet, they go to google and switch off when they see what they view as buckets of work to just get started. We have a lot of Puppet users on Mac, BSD, and now Windows too, so it's not just Linux. In a nutshell the perception and feedback I get and I feel this myself, is that the competency level of those whose regularly participate in this list, and in other internet forums may just be a bit too good. I feel as if puppet is lacking a sort of nursery area. After all, everyone here is already a 'professional' or so we like to think! Would it be a good idea to have a puppet beginners list, where people can post dumb questions, and maybe have some patient people posting links to blog entries, you tube videos (something which I noticed is lacking for puppet, again making it hard for me to evangelise about it, to even get clients to look at it), and get up to speed with you guys. I would like a Puppet Nursery - Or failing that, can we get a puppet advance list? :) I'm just saying - It worked for a different project, that's part of how ubuntu started
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
Thanks for the replies from all the puppet lab guys, and the members of this list. It really brighten my day to read all the responses. I've learnt that maybe I'm not so stupid after all! Ah yes, and that a second list is a no no!! (It wasn't my best suggestion, but the community helped me see the light) I am really looking forward to Integrated Platform Team Puppet are currently working on. It goes without saying that the more content that gets gobbled up by google and indexed, the more lonely newbies that will be rescued by that search bar. I do have a more confidence puppet. I hope I didn't panic any of Team Puppet, you guys are doing a great job, honestly, I've had my butt pulled out the fire a good few times because of my basic of the most basic puppet setup, so I'm a fan On 3 Apr 2012, at 21:13, Nigel Kersten wrote: We do want to be running this, primarily because we want to provide an integrated platform that includes a bit more than just the QA site itself. We'd like to be able to integrate profiles across the Forge, a QA site and even the bug tracker. It would be great if you were on a QA site, asking questions about developing modules, and to be able to see that the person answering your question has published several awesome Puppet modules that are really popular. Vice versa, it would be great to be able to look at a module and see that the author is a highly engaged member of the community. So all in all, we do want to provide this as a service by us, and it's difficult to get that level of integration with StackExchange. I would like to point out that we've got a growing ServerFault community under the 'puppet' tag, and there are some great people answering Puppet questions there. This is clearly an even more pressing need than we'd been thinking, so we're going to try and accelerate this. -- Nigel Kersten Product Manager, Puppet Labs -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 1:22 PM, Mister IT Guru misteritg...@gmx.com wrote: Thanks for the replies from all the puppet lab guys, and the members of this list. It really brighten my day to read all the responses. I've learnt that maybe I'm not so stupid after all! Ah yes, and that a second list is a no no!! (It wasn't my best suggestion, but the community helped me see the light) I am really looking forward to Integrated Platform Team Puppet are currently working on. It goes without saying that the more content that gets gobbled up by google and indexed, the more lonely newbies that will be rescued by that search bar. I do have a more confidence puppet. I hope I didn't panic any of Team Puppet, you guys are doing a great job, honestly, I've had my butt pulled out the fire a good few times because of my basic of the most basic puppet setup, so I'm a fan No apologies necessary at all, and certainly no panic :) We also love hearing stories about Puppet pulling butts out of fires :) On 3 Apr 2012, at 21:13, Nigel Kersten wrote: We do want to be running this, primarily because we want to provide an integrated platform that includes a bit more than just the QA site itself. We'd like to be able to integrate profiles across the Forge, a QA site and even the bug tracker. It would be great if you were on a QA site, asking questions about developing modules, and to be able to see that the person answering your question has published several awesome Puppet modules that are really popular. Vice versa, it would be great to be able to look at a module and see that the author is a highly engaged member of the community. So all in all, we do want to provide this as a service by us, and it's difficult to get that level of integration with StackExchange. I would like to point out that we've got a growing ServerFault community under the 'puppet' tag, and there are some great people answering Puppet questions there. This is clearly an even more pressing need than we'd been thinking, so we're going to try and accelerate this. -- Nigel Kersten Product Manager, Puppet Labs -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en. -- Nigel Kersten Product Manager, Puppet Labs -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
I am personally completely against splitting the list. It will basically force everyone to be in the two lists, and even worse, those with a question that does not get an answer, will try with the second list. Besides, when you have a question, how do you know if it's a difficult one? Sometimes you just hit a bug when you are newby, and sometimes you are missing a comma when you are expert. Then, for people like me that are learning, it is very useful to see all those questions getting answer, you learn really a lot from other's questions. I would really focus on the documentation. Maybe going through it, checking which paragraphs are more confusing or hide not-so-easy concepts or common misconceptions, and back up with better real-life examples, together with a FAQ, would probably remove 30% of the questions there are here. Thanks for this list! Pablo On 04/03/2012 07:56 AM, Brian Gupta wrote: Michael, Would you guys consider standing up a shapado instance? http://shapado.com/ (It's basically an FLOSS clone of stackoverflow, and is great for QA type stuff.) You could stand it up as ask.puppetlabs.com http://ask.puppetlabs.com, and point new users there for questions. One of the big issues of puppet-users, is simple the volume of emails that are blasted into ones inbox. (Ignoring the diverse nature of the various discussions.) In addition, I have a sense that IRC and mailing lists are a bit old-school, and can be intimidating to new users. Personally, I don't love mailing lists, in that I don't want to have to subscribe to EVERYTHING, to get the answer to a single question. I'd also like to address Scott's critique of FAQs. I think that no matter how good and complete the documentation, there will be frequently asked questions. It's just the nature of the beast. Thanks, Brian On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Michael Stahnke stah...@puppetlabs.com mailto:stah...@puppetlabs.com wrote: Hey, we've been having some mailing list discussion on and off inside of Puppet Labs too. Obviously we have a large community that we are trying to appeal to, and we keep doing our best to create the experience for the user-base. Breaking the users list into two lists has its pros and cons. Pros: * Less code fragments in emails * Advanced users not bogged down with new user questions Cons: * Fragmentation of the user-base * Who will monitor/answer questions on a new user list? * New people may not learn from more experienced people, because the more experienced users may not subscribe to the new-users list What I really think we need, is a way to provide knowledge to new users in an efficient (and non fragmented) way. In the past we had a horrible problem with documentation all over the place, wiki issues, blogs from everybody and their brother, etc. Today, we have narrowed those problems with the Learning Puppet series. (http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning/), and lots of other documentation improvements on docs.puppetlabs.com http://docs.puppetlabs.com. The points about FAQ make complete sense. We'd like to address this with proper documentation and some other online presence that will be rolled out in the in the next quarter or so. As an interrum, could we have a wiki page where we place questions that get asked frequently and have no (or incomplete) associated documentation? http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/Frequent_Questions_Without_Answers We also hope that IRC is helpful and remains helpful. I don't often see RTFM comments coming out in #puppet. When I do, it's quite often because their exact question was already answered, with citations, and the user still didn't read it. Also in this thread somebody mentioned helping those willing to help themselves. That's a fair statement, but we really want to make this an accepting community to make everybody better at their workloads with Puppet. I hope I've attempted to answer some of the concerns. I am totally willing to revisit this in 90 days or so if the community thinks we should be handling this differently. This is also by no means designed to close this discussion, so please weigh in if you have opinions. Michael Stahnke Community Manager On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Mister IT Guru misteritg...@gmx.com mailto:misteritg...@gmx.com wrote: Good Evening Guys, Let me start by saying that I really admire how far puppet has come in the last year or so, with the launch of the Enterprise version, Puppet Forge and the other innovations from within Puppet Labs, and in particular the community participation. I love the mailing list, even though I've been lurking for over a year. It's this inner shame that compels me to raise this issue. I apologise if this is not the place to mention
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
For searching older info, try http://www.mail-archive.com/puppet-users@googlegroups.com/ But I concur -1 for separation “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.” Bill Waterson (Calvin Hobbes) - Denmat tu2bg...@gmail.com wrote: How about a 'serverfault' or 'stackoverflow' or the like site? One of the issues I find is that previous answers are lost in mail lists and hard to search for. IRC isn't much help for searching previous answers either. -1 for separate lists. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Michael Stahnke stah...@puppetlabs.com wrote: Breaking the users list into two lists has its pros and cons. Pros: * Less code fragments in emails * Advanced users not bogged down with new user questions Cons: * Fragmentation of the user-base * Who will monitor/answer questions on a new user list? * New people may not learn from more experienced people, because the more experienced users may not subscribe to the new-users list I'm -1 on separating the list. While there's a lot of discussion that isn't relevant or interesting to me on the list, there's been a non-trivial number of posts that have directly addressed issues I was researching, or have helped me work through stumbling blocks. Some of it is simple serendipity, but I'd have lost out on those things if I was only subscribed to the -newbie list. We also hope that IRC is helpful and remains helpful. I don't often see RTFM comments coming out in #puppet. When I do, it's quite often because their exact question was already answered, with citations, and the user still didn't read it. Also in this thread somebody mentioned helping those willing to help themselves. That's a fair statement, but we really want to make this an accepting community to make everybody better at their workloads with Puppet. For what it's worth, my experiences in the IRC channel have been nothing but positive. Yes, my questions have been sometimes answered with a simple link to existing documentation, but in most cases thus far those links have been exactly what I needed. And it's worth pointing out that the links were not provided with aggression or derision, but a matter-of-fact here's what you need. Because there are multiple ways to use Puppet to resolve the problems of configuration management, there seems to me to be a gulf between what's documented and what people are using in production. Stated another way, there's a gap between the how and the why. Cheers, Scott -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 10:56 PM, Brian Gupta brian.gu...@brandorr.comwrote: Michael, Would you guys consider standing up a shapado instance? http://shapado.com/ (It's basically an FLOSS clone of stackoverflow, and is great for QA type stuff.) You could stand it up as ask.puppetlabs.com, and point new users there for questions. One of the big issues of puppet-users, is simple the volume of emails that are blasted into ones inbox. (Ignoring the diverse nature of the various discussions.) In addition, I have a sense that IRC and mailing lists are a bit old-school, and can be intimidating to new users. We've had similar thoughts about accessibility and a QA site, and have been thinking seriously about a FLOSS clone of stackoverflow. Last time we had a look around OSQA http://www.osqa.net/ seemed to be the best candidate, thanks for the Shapado link Brian. Personally, I don't love mailing lists, in that I don't want to have to subscribe to EVERYTHING, to get the answer to a single question. I'd also like to address Scott's critique of FAQs. I think that no matter how good and complete the documentation, there will be frequently asked questions. It's just the nature of the beast. Thanks, Brian On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Michael Stahnke stah...@puppetlabs.comwrote: Hey, we've been having some mailing list discussion on and off inside of Puppet Labs too. Obviously we have a large community that we are trying to appeal to, and we keep doing our best to create the experience for the user-base. Breaking the users list into two lists has its pros and cons. Pros: * Less code fragments in emails * Advanced users not bogged down with new user questions Cons: * Fragmentation of the user-base * Who will monitor/answer questions on a new user list? * New people may not learn from more experienced people, because the more experienced users may not subscribe to the new-users list What I really think we need, is a way to provide knowledge to new users in an efficient (and non fragmented) way. In the past we had a horrible problem with documentation all over the place, wiki issues, blogs from everybody and their brother, etc. Today, we have narrowed those problems with the Learning Puppet series. (http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning/), and lots of other documentation improvements on docs.puppetlabs.com. The points about FAQ make complete sense. We'd like to address this with proper documentation and some other online presence that will be rolled out in the in the next quarter or so. As an interrum, could we have a wiki page where we place questions that get asked frequently and have no (or incomplete) associated documentation? http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/Frequent_Questions_Without_Answers We also hope that IRC is helpful and remains helpful. I don't often see RTFM comments coming out in #puppet. When I do, it's quite often because their exact question was already answered, with citations, and the user still didn't read it. Also in this thread somebody mentioned helping those willing to help themselves. That's a fair statement, but we really want to make this an accepting community to make everybody better at their workloads with Puppet. I hope I've attempted to answer some of the concerns. I am totally willing to revisit this in 90 days or so if the community thinks we should be handling this differently. This is also by no means designed to close this discussion, so please weigh in if you have opinions. Michael Stahnke Community Manager On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Mister IT Guru misteritg...@gmx.com wrote: Good Evening Guys, Let me start by saying that I really admire how far puppet has come in the last year or so, with the launch of the Enterprise version, Puppet Forge and the other innovations from within Puppet Labs, and in particular the community participation. I love the mailing list, even though I've been lurking for over a year. It's this inner shame that compels me to raise this issue. I apologise if this is not the place to mention this, but hey, you've already got this far, so keep reading! I get stage fright looking at some of the code fragments that people post to the list and then say This is how far I've got and I'm trying to do X where X is something pretty complex/unique doesn't quite seem like best practice or something that you'll find on a general use linux box. While I have no problem or even issue with this, the problem I find is that when I tell my admin geek friends about puppet, they go to google and switch off when they see what they view as buckets of work to just get started. We have a lot of Puppet users on Mac, BSD, and now Windows too, so it's not just Linux. In a nutshell the perception and feedback I get and I feel this myself, is that the competency level of those whose regularly participate in this list, and in other internet
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 22:53, Denmat tu2bg...@gmail.com wrote: How about a 'serverfault' or 'stackoverflow' or the like site? One of the issues I find is that previous answers are lost in mail lists and hard to search for. IRC isn't much help for searching previous answers either. I would absolutely support getting a new StackExchange site for configuration management or something going. What it really needs is someone to drive that forward - you can't just ask for one, it needs a community. -- Daniel Pittman ⎋ Puppet Labs Developer – http://puppetlabs.com ♲ Made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Daniel Pittman dan...@puppetlabs.comwrote: On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 22:53, Denmat tu2bg...@gmail.com wrote: How about a 'serverfault' or 'stackoverflow' or the like site? One of the issues I find is that previous answers are lost in mail lists and hard to search for. IRC isn't much help for searching previous answers either. I would absolutely support getting a new StackExchange site for configuration management or something going. What it really needs is someone to drive that forward - you can't just ask for one, it needs a community. Daniel, mmm.. do we want a general purpose configuration management site or a puppet specific one? I'd be willing to help host and setup a puppet specific one, however, I'd have thought that would be something that puppetlabs would want to own/run. Feel free to discuss internally, and let me know which way you guys want to go. Thanks, Brian -- Daniel Pittman ⎋ Puppet Labs Developer – http://puppetlabs.com ♲ Made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en. -- http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/solution-providers/brandorr/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:53 PM, Brian Gupta brian.gu...@brandorr.comwrote: On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Daniel Pittman dan...@puppetlabs.comwrote: On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 22:53, Denmat tu2bg...@gmail.com wrote: How about a 'serverfault' or 'stackoverflow' or the like site? One of the issues I find is that previous answers are lost in mail lists and hard to search for. IRC isn't much help for searching previous answers either. I would absolutely support getting a new StackExchange site for configuration management or something going. What it really needs is someone to drive that forward - you can't just ask for one, it needs a community. Daniel, mmm.. do we want a general purpose configuration management site or a puppet specific one? I'd be willing to help host and setup a puppet specific one, however, I'd have thought that would be something that puppetlabs would want to own/run. Feel free to discuss internally, and let me know which way you guys want to go. Hey Brian, thanks for the offer, it's much appreciated. We do want to be running this, primarily because we want to provide an integrated platform that includes a bit more than just the QA site itself. We'd like to be able to integrate profiles across the Forge, a QA site and even the bug tracker. It would be great if you were on a QA site, asking questions about developing modules, and to be able to see that the person answering your question has published several awesome Puppet modules that are really popular. Vice versa, it would be great to be able to look at a module and see that the author is a highly engaged member of the community. So all in all, we do want to provide this as a service by us, and it's difficult to get that level of integration with StackExchange. I would like to point out that we've got a growing ServerFault community under the 'puppet' tag, and there are some great people answering Puppet questions there. This is clearly an even more pressing need than we'd been thinking, so we're going to try and accelerate this. -- Nigel Kersten Product Manager, Puppet Labs -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Nigel Kersten ni...@puppetlabs.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:53 PM, Brian Gupta brian.gu...@brandorr.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Daniel Pittman dan...@puppetlabs.com wrote: On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 22:53, Denmat tu2bg...@gmail.com wrote: How about a 'serverfault' or 'stackoverflow' or the like site? One of the issues I find is that previous answers are lost in mail lists and hard to search for. IRC isn't much help for searching previous answers either. I would absolutely support getting a new StackExchange site for configuration management or something going. What it really needs is someone to drive that forward - you can't just ask for one, it needs a community. Daniel, mmm.. do we want a general purpose configuration management site or a puppet specific one? I'd be willing to help host and setup a puppet specific one, however, I'd have thought that would be something that puppetlabs would want to own/run. Feel free to discuss internally, and let me know which way you guys want to go. Hey Brian, thanks for the offer, it's much appreciated. We do want to be running this, primarily because we want to provide an integrated platform that includes a bit more than just the QA site itself. We'd like to be able to integrate profiles across the Forge, a QA site and even the bug tracker. It would be great if you were on a QA site, asking questions about developing modules, and to be able to see that the person answering your question has published several awesome Puppet modules that are really popular. Vice versa, it would be great to be able to look at a module and see that the author is a highly engaged member of the community. So all in all, we do want to provide this as a service by us, and it's difficult to get that level of integration with StackExchange. I would like to point out that we've got a growing ServerFault community under the 'puppet' tag, and there are some great people answering Puppet questions there. This is clearly an even more pressing need than we'd been thinking, so we're going to try and accelerate this. And to post the actual ServerFault link: http://serverfault.com/questions/tagged/puppet -- Nigel Kersten Product Manager, Puppet Labs -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
Would it be a good idea to have a puppet beginners list, where people can post dumb questions, and maybe have some patient people posting links [snip] Without wanting to pigeon hole or stereotype anyone, my experience from the IRC channel in particular is that dumb questions that get asked often show that the poster has not read through the online documentation and has jumped straight into the community support channels instead. No-one minds helping a struggling beginner, but the old him who helps himself saying applies and I think for most people, if they genuinely read the excellent language guide properly they would answer the majority of beginner questions on their own. Some people take offense when told on IRC to RTFM, or given an anchor link to the docs in response to a question, but it simply is the best source of information to their issues. Providing a beginners mailing list IMO would only encourage people to bypass the docs even more. 2p/w :) Craig -- Craig Dunn | http://www.craigdunn.org Yahoo/Skype: craigrdunn | Twitter: @crayfishX -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 5:12 AM, Craig Dunn cr...@craigdunn.org wrote: Would it be a good idea to have a puppet beginners list, where people can post dumb questions, and maybe have some patient people posting links [snip] Without wanting to pigeon hole or stereotype anyone, my experience from the IRC channel in particular is that dumb questions that get asked often show that the poster has not read through the online documentation and has jumped straight into the community support channels instead. No-one minds helping a struggling beginner, but the old him who helps himself saying applies and I think for most people, if they genuinely read the excellent language guide properly they would answer the majority of beginner questions on their own. Some people take offense when told on IRC to RTFM, or given an anchor link to the docs in response to a question, but it simply is the best source of information to their issues. Providing a beginners mailing list IMO would only encourage people to bypass the docs even more. I do not agree with this sentiment. The docs are a great reference, but they can certainly be overwhelming to a beginner. We all should definitely make folks feel comfortable asking whatever questions they have. If the fear is that the IRC channel and mailing list would get bogged down with folks asking the same beginner questions over and over, I offer a couple thoughts: * we can aways go with the OP's suggestions and start new avenues for such questions * answering easy questions scales: that is, the easier a question is, the more people that can answer it. * The corollary to the previous point is that if you find answering easy questions tedious, you do not have to; someone else can most likely pick it up * Opening the floodgates to the easy questions makes it very obvious what needs to go in the FAQ :-) I have been helped out so much by the fine folks on IRC that I love it when I get a chance to help someone out with any problem. ;-) -- Chad M. Huneycutt -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 8:56 AM, Chad Huneycutt chad.huneyc...@gmail.com wrote: * Opening the floodgates to the easy questions makes it very obvious what needs to go in the FAQ :-) As a slight aside, I think that a list of frequently asked questions is a statement that the documentation is incomplete. If those questions are so frequently asked, why isn't the documentation updated to account for them in the first place? See also Rich Bowen's Write a better FM book: http://betterfm.org/ Cheers, Scott -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Puppet Users group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
Hey, we've been having some mailing list discussion on and off inside of Puppet Labs too. Obviously we have a large community that we are trying to appeal to, and we keep doing our best to create the experience for the user-base. Breaking the users list into two lists has its pros and cons. Pros: * Less code fragments in emails * Advanced users not bogged down with new user questions Cons: * Fragmentation of the user-base * Who will monitor/answer questions on a new user list? * New people may not learn from more experienced people, because the more experienced users may not subscribe to the new-users list What I really think we need, is a way to provide knowledge to new users in an efficient (and non fragmented) way. In the past we had a horrible problem with documentation all over the place, wiki issues, blogs from everybody and their brother, etc. Today, we have narrowed those problems with the Learning Puppet series. (http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning/), and lots of other documentation improvements on docs.puppetlabs.com. The points about FAQ make complete sense. We'd like to address this with proper documentation and some other online presence that will be rolled out in the in the next quarter or so. As an interrum, could we have a wiki page where we place questions that get asked frequently and have no (or incomplete) associated documentation? http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/Frequent_Questions_Without_Answers We also hope that IRC is helpful and remains helpful. I don't often see RTFM comments coming out in #puppet. When I do, it's quite often because their exact question was already answered, with citations, and the user still didn't read it. Also in this thread somebody mentioned helping those willing to help themselves. That's a fair statement, but we really want to make this an accepting community to make everybody better at their workloads with Puppet. I hope I've attempted to answer some of the concerns. I am totally willing to revisit this in 90 days or so if the community thinks we should be handling this differently. This is also by no means designed to close this discussion, so please weigh in if you have opinions. Michael Stahnke Community Manager On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Mister IT Guru misteritg...@gmx.com wrote: Good Evening Guys, Let me start by saying that I really admire how far puppet has come in the last year or so, with the launch of the Enterprise version, Puppet Forge and the other innovations from within Puppet Labs, and in particular the community participation. I love the mailing list, even though I've been lurking for over a year. It's this inner shame that compels me to raise this issue. I apologise if this is not the place to mention this, but hey, you've already got this far, so keep reading! I get stage fright looking at some of the code fragments that people post to the list and then say This is how far I've got and I'm trying to do X where X is something pretty complex/unique doesn't quite seem like best practice or something that you'll find on a general use linux box. While I have no problem or even issue with this, the problem I find is that when I tell my admin geek friends about puppet, they go to google and switch off when they see what they view as buckets of work to just get started. We have a lot of Puppet users on Mac, BSD, and now Windows too, so it's not just Linux. In a nutshell the perception and feedback I get and I feel this myself, is that the competency level of those whose regularly participate in this list, and in other internet forums may just be a bit too good. I feel as if puppet is lacking a sort of nursery area. After all, everyone here is already a 'professional' or so we like to think! Would it be a good idea to have a puppet beginners list, where people can post dumb questions, and maybe have some patient people posting links to blog entries, you tube videos (something which I noticed is lacking for puppet, again making it hard for me to evangelise about it, to even get clients to look at it), and get up to speed with you guys. I would like a Puppet Nursery - Or failing that, can we get a puppet advance list? :) I'm just saying - It worked for a different project, that's part of how ubuntu started to take over the world, it just became accessible to the casual user. Well, there are a bucket load of causal professional linux admins, who I fear may dismiss taking up puppet because they just can't get the time together to learn or keep up with those who puppet 24/7 It's just an observation, with a request thrown in - If I annoyed you, upset you, hurt your ego or made you feel bad in any way, I'm sorry. If you wish to take it up with me personally, no problem, have your people call my people, and we'll set up the meet - I'm a big guy so bring backup! (just kidding, love peace and all that!) - I'm hoping to stimulate some
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
How about a 'serverfault' or 'stackoverflow' or the like site? One of the issues I find is that previous answers are lost in mail lists and hard to search for. IRC isn't much help for searching previous answers either. -1 for separate lists. Den On 03/04/2012, at 14:30, Michael Stahnke stah...@puppetlabs.com wrote: Hey, we've been having some mailing list discussion on and off inside of Puppet Labs too. Obviously we have a large community that we are trying to appeal to, and we keep doing our best to create the experience for the user-base. Breaking the users list into two lists has its pros and cons. Pros: * Less code fragments in emails * Advanced users not bogged down with new user questions Cons: * Fragmentation of the user-base * Who will monitor/answer questions on a new user list? * New people may not learn from more experienced people, because the more experienced users may not subscribe to the new-users list What I really think we need, is a way to provide knowledge to new users in an efficient (and non fragmented) way. In the past we had a horrible problem with documentation all over the place, wiki issues, blogs from everybody and their brother, etc. Today, we have narrowed those problems with the Learning Puppet series. (http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning/), and lots of other documentation improvements on docs.puppetlabs.com. The points about FAQ make complete sense. We'd like to address this with proper documentation and some other online presence that will be rolled out in the in the next quarter or so. As an interrum, could we have a wiki page where we place questions that get asked frequently and have no (or incomplete) associated documentation? http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/Frequent_Questions_Without_Answers We also hope that IRC is helpful and remains helpful. I don't often see RTFM comments coming out in #puppet. When I do, it's quite often because their exact question was already answered, with citations, and the user still didn't read it. Also in this thread somebody mentioned helping those willing to help themselves. That's a fair statement, but we really want to make this an accepting community to make everybody better at their workloads with Puppet. I hope I've attempted to answer some of the concerns. I am totally willing to revisit this in 90 days or so if the community thinks we should be handling this differently. This is also by no means designed to close this discussion, so please weigh in if you have opinions. Michael Stahnke Community Manager On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Mister IT Guru misteritg...@gmx.com wrote: Good Evening Guys, Let me start by saying that I really admire how far puppet has come in the last year or so, with the launch of the Enterprise version, Puppet Forge and the other innovations from within Puppet Labs, and in particular the community participation. I love the mailing list, even though I've been lurking for over a year. It's this inner shame that compels me to raise this issue. I apologise if this is not the place to mention this, but hey, you've already got this far, so keep reading! I get stage fright looking at some of the code fragments that people post to the list and then say This is how far I've got and I'm trying to do X where X is something pretty complex/unique doesn't quite seem like best practice or something that you'll find on a general use linux box. While I have no problem or even issue with this, the problem I find is that when I tell my admin geek friends about puppet, they go to google and switch off when they see what they view as buckets of work to just get started. We have a lot of Puppet users on Mac, BSD, and now Windows too, so it's not just Linux. In a nutshell the perception and feedback I get and I feel this myself, is that the competency level of those whose regularly participate in this list, and in other internet forums may just be a bit too good. I feel as if puppet is lacking a sort of nursery area. After all, everyone here is already a 'professional' or so we like to think! Would it be a good idea to have a puppet beginners list, where people can post dumb questions, and maybe have some patient people posting links to blog entries, you tube videos (something which I noticed is lacking for puppet, again making it hard for me to evangelise about it, to even get clients to look at it), and get up to speed with you guys. I would like a Puppet Nursery - Or failing that, can we get a puppet advance list? :) I'm just saying - It worked for a different project, that's part of how ubuntu started to take over the world, it just became accessible to the casual user. Well, there are a bucket load of causal professional linux admins, who I fear may dismiss taking up puppet because they just can't get the time together to learn or keep up with
Re: [Puppet Users] Puppet Beginners: New list suggestion?
Michael, Would you guys consider standing up a shapado instance? http://shapado.com/(It's basically an FLOSS clone of stackoverflow, and is great for QA type stuff.) You could stand it up as ask.puppetlabs.com, and point new users there for questions. One of the big issues of puppet-users, is simple the volume of emails that are blasted into ones inbox. (Ignoring the diverse nature of the various discussions.) In addition, I have a sense that IRC and mailing lists are a bit old-school, and can be intimidating to new users. Personally, I don't love mailing lists, in that I don't want to have to subscribe to EVERYTHING, to get the answer to a single question. I'd also like to address Scott's critique of FAQs. I think that no matter how good and complete the documentation, there will be frequently asked questions. It's just the nature of the beast. Thanks, Brian On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Michael Stahnke stah...@puppetlabs.comwrote: Hey, we've been having some mailing list discussion on and off inside of Puppet Labs too. Obviously we have a large community that we are trying to appeal to, and we keep doing our best to create the experience for the user-base. Breaking the users list into two lists has its pros and cons. Pros: * Less code fragments in emails * Advanced users not bogged down with new user questions Cons: * Fragmentation of the user-base * Who will monitor/answer questions on a new user list? * New people may not learn from more experienced people, because the more experienced users may not subscribe to the new-users list What I really think we need, is a way to provide knowledge to new users in an efficient (and non fragmented) way. In the past we had a horrible problem with documentation all over the place, wiki issues, blogs from everybody and their brother, etc. Today, we have narrowed those problems with the Learning Puppet series. (http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning/), and lots of other documentation improvements on docs.puppetlabs.com. The points about FAQ make complete sense. We'd like to address this with proper documentation and some other online presence that will be rolled out in the in the next quarter or so. As an interrum, could we have a wiki page where we place questions that get asked frequently and have no (or incomplete) associated documentation? http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/Frequent_Questions_Without_Answers We also hope that IRC is helpful and remains helpful. I don't often see RTFM comments coming out in #puppet. When I do, it's quite often because their exact question was already answered, with citations, and the user still didn't read it. Also in this thread somebody mentioned helping those willing to help themselves. That's a fair statement, but we really want to make this an accepting community to make everybody better at their workloads with Puppet. I hope I've attempted to answer some of the concerns. I am totally willing to revisit this in 90 days or so if the community thinks we should be handling this differently. This is also by no means designed to close this discussion, so please weigh in if you have opinions. Michael Stahnke Community Manager On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Mister IT Guru misteritg...@gmx.com wrote: Good Evening Guys, Let me start by saying that I really admire how far puppet has come in the last year or so, with the launch of the Enterprise version, Puppet Forge and the other innovations from within Puppet Labs, and in particular the community participation. I love the mailing list, even though I've been lurking for over a year. It's this inner shame that compels me to raise this issue. I apologise if this is not the place to mention this, but hey, you've already got this far, so keep reading! I get stage fright looking at some of the code fragments that people post to the list and then say This is how far I've got and I'm trying to do X where X is something pretty complex/unique doesn't quite seem like best practice or something that you'll find on a general use linux box. While I have no problem or even issue with this, the problem I find is that when I tell my admin geek friends about puppet, they go to google and switch off when they see what they view as buckets of work to just get started. We have a lot of Puppet users on Mac, BSD, and now Windows too, so it's not just Linux. In a nutshell the perception and feedback I get and I feel this myself, is that the competency level of those whose regularly participate in this list, and in other internet forums may just be a bit too good. I feel as if puppet is lacking a sort of nursery area. After all, everyone here is already a 'professional' or so we like to think! Would it be a good idea to have a puppet beginners list, where people can post dumb questions, and maybe have some patient people posting links to blog entries, you tube videos (something
