Hey everyone, as Jorge said, I have some feedback, mostly specified in my blog, but I'll go ahead and summarize it here.
First off, before I begin, just want to say thanks to all the Canonical employees and those who volunteer that have dedicated time to making Juju, reviewing charms, authoring charms, etc. Your work and dedication allowed myself to go from having no charm (hehe) to a charm in two days. 1. I agree that it is time to promote Vagrant. It would have saved me hours during Charm development if I had saw Vagrant (it was sorta hidden in the Local section and wasn't promoted as the preferred option since it's considered "Beta"), rather than resorting to setting up a VirtualBox with Ubuntu Server and manually FTP'ing new files to my public server then pulling them down with wget to the local Ubuntu Server VM. 2. The relations documentation is pretty sparse (as in two or three pages at most) and to be honest, a bit overwhelming. The same page that covers relations also covers almost every other aspect of setting up and beginning development of the charm and it'd be nice to see everything relating to relations (as well as a better explanation of it), be dedicated to it's own page and try to differentiate itself from hooks like start, restart, stop, config-changed and upgrade-charm. 3. Related to #1 (of my points) and #3 of Jorge's, it'd be nice to emphazise Vagrant as the preferred "local" way of setting up a Juju container, even if that means hiding away information on doing it in a VM or using something like Docker (abstraction layer on top of LXCs). 4. The Charm Testing page (https://juju.ubuntu.com/docs/authors-testing.html) is unnecessarily complex. Testing should emphasize understanding and analyzing the agent-state when a Charm is being deployed (unless I'm doing things wrong, it seems that most of the debugging I did was when I'd juju deploy my charm), rather than the special testing scripts that are written up on the current page. In testing, when I noticed that the agent-state of my Charm was that the install failed (I'm new to bash scriping), I had no idea where my logs were (naturally I went to /var/logs) but since it is local, apparently it was in ~/.juju/local/log/charm-0.log 5. In my blog write-up, I explained the best way I retry testing, which is to completely destroy the environment, generate a new config, delete everything inside .juju, switch to local, then bootstrap. It wasn't until Jorge let me know that there was an easier to do all of that (using juju quickstart, which isn't even listed as a command at https://juju.ubuntu.com/docs/commands.html and apparently requires particular packages) did I even know. So, describing how to easily test a charm locally without destroying your entire environment over and over again, in the Charm Testing page would be fantastic. 6. Lastly of my feedback, the Submitting a new Charm (The Juju Charm Store) page (https://juju.ubuntu.com/docs/authors-charm-store.html#submitting) doesn't provide any information on setting up a Launchpad account, making sure the person has a GPG fingerprint, SSH key, has signed the Code of Conduct, etc (I wrote about all that in my blog). It just sorta assumes they've already done that and proceeds to talk about bzr. While I did in fact have a Launchpad account already, I still think it would be nice to have a note at the top of the page that let's people know. Thanks again, I look forward to the discussion, future Charm authoring and eventually (if I get enough time) being a part of the Charm reviewers. - Joshua Strobl > Some feedback from Josh Strobl: > > http://joshstrobl.blogspot.com/2014/02/developing-ubuntu-juju-charm.html > I've left some comments: > https://plus.google.com/+JoshuaStrobl/posts/UEXzk4THYJs > > Some things I'd like to propose: > > 1. Is it time to "promote" the Vagrant box to a more visible place on > juju.u.c/install? > 2. We should expand the relations documentation in general. > 3. We tell people how to set up a local environment but not how to use > it for charm development. We need to do things like sharing how to set > up a shared directory, how to ping pong back and forth with > debug-hooks and upgrade-charm. > 4. Should we consider shipping quickstart ootb? It's replaced > generate-config for me. > > -- > Jorge Castro > Canonical Ltd. > http://juju.ubuntu.com/ - Automate your Cloud Infrastructure > > -- Juju mailing list Juju@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/juju