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From: Romain Manni-Bucau <rmannibucau@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2017 22:28:14 +0200
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Subject: Re: Some thoughts on Sirona
To: dev@sirona.incubator.apache.org
Cc: "John D. Ament" <johndament@apache.org>
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archived-at: Sat, 29 Apr 2017 20:28:26 -0000

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Hi Emeric

Think it is a very accurate feedback - and we should take it for some other
projects too. Guess it is too late for sirona@apache but always good to
remind such important points.

Thanks for that!


Le 29 avr. 2017 20:16, "Vernat Emeric" <evernat@free.fr> a =C3=A9crit :

Hi all,

I would like to say some thoughts on Sirona, as a kind of advice or remarks
on community growth. I will use English even if we all speak French here ;-=
)
(These are from my point of view and I am neither a Sirona project's member
or an Apache member. There are certainly other points of view and your
thoughts may be better than mine.)

When we look at the Sirona web page (http://sirona.apache.org/), the first
thing written is:
"*NEW: 18th Nov 2015 release of 0.3-incubating as a technology preview*".

Wow, that's not new for sure. It seems like Sirona was already dead in the
egg since 2015, so most users and contributors will leave without reading
the end of the page. Only few will see the reality beyond that.
I think that new releases would have shown that the project is not dead and
that it adds features and fixes bugs as needed by users: 2 or 3 releases
per year is a minimum I think.

Then, for sure, Sirona has a lot of features (for example, Cassandra,
Graphite, Square cube, ...) and perhaps too many features. But I think that
the documentation is far from usable for a standard Java developer.

For example, one of the first link in the documentation is about
"Concepts": great, I would like to know the Concepts of monitoring with
Sirona.
Problem is that the Concepts page starts with:/
    The repository is a singleton for the JVM. It is the entry point to get
access to counters and gauges./

/
        public interface Repository extends Iterable<Counter> {
           Counter getCounter(Counter.Key key);
           void clear();
           StopWatch start(Counter counter);

           Map<Long, Double> getGaugeValues(long start, long end, Role
role);
           void stopGauge(Role role);
        }
/When wanting to know the concepts of Sirona as a first step to learn what
it is, I was not asking for a Java interface (which I don't really
understand anyway).

So after the Concepts page, I am going to the Deployments page. At least, I
should be able to install Sirona.
But the Deployments give 5 or 6 "solutions" which are: everything locally,
agent/collector, push/pull, automatics registration or not, cassandra or
not. I am a bit lost with all that. So going first to "everything locally"
for the simple solution.
And first thing in "everything locally" is :
/TBD//
/As a Sirona user, I should have run away at this point.
By the way, later on the same page, it is suggested to see the cassandra
doc page without giving a link to that page and it is suggested to
configure properties without saying where those properties should be
written.

After finally finding the Cassandra page it says again to configure
properties without saying where to write them. Then the Cassandra page
continues with a long list of incomprehensible database details. Am I
supposed to understand those details?

As a last word, in the quick start guide, version is out of date and the
Square cube link is dead. But the quick start guide is not that bad except
the last sentence: "Documentation coming soon".


All that to say that the documentation seems not finished, not cohesive
enough, without much guiding for choices and not usable enough for a
standard developer, in my point of view. Having a lot of features does not
help.
And no releases since Nov 2015 confirms that.

I do not know if there would have been more community growth with better
documentation and releases, but at the moment it does not help.

And about leadership in the project, it's true that projects with a
dictactor (or slave) for life are more often successful in the end: Jenkins
is a good example. But of course, everyone can choose other priorities than
Sirona at some point in time. Perhaps a dictator for life would have helped
to launch the project.


Regards,
Emeric

Again, this is from my point of view and I am neither a Sirona project's
member or an Apache member. There are certainly other points of view and
your thoughts may be better than mine.

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