[ClusterLabs] Community's communication sustainability (Was: recommendations for corosync totem timeout for CentOS 7 + VMware?)

[Jan Pokorný]

On 22/03/19 15:02 +0300, Andrei Borzenkov wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 1:08 PM Jan Pokorný <jpokorny at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Also a Friday's idea:
>> Perhaps we should crank up "how to ask" manual for this list
> 
> Yest another one?
> 
> http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

That's the essence that can be linked along (I had that document
somewhere back on my mind when proposing that), but I also
had some very specific points to raise:

- decision diagram on what information is usually requested for
  particular community assisted debugging of particular
  behaviours of particular parts of the stack, possibly
  generalized around how to find out which of the component
  needs this level of investigation in the first place

- link to community-managed index of notable posts previously
  circulated on the lists
  (I am not very good and possibly also biased at maintaining
   https://wiki.clusterlabs.org/wiki/Lists%27_Digest, anyone
   is welcome to step in and grow the insightful usefulness
   of some, sometimes very elaborate, posts to the MLs, it
   would certainly use some more love)

- centralized summary of where the issue reports for particular
  components are expected, and how the existing ones can
  be searched

- (whatever will help to cut the collateral time spent on
  progress towards the satisfaction of the original poster,
  be it a providing appropriate pieces of information off
  the bat, getting to understand the shared terminology to
  avoid communication problems like in this very case,
  issue routing or whatever else;
  still someone not getting the importance of fencing?)

This is not to discourage rather a generic purposing of the
lists, but primarily to limit signal-to-noise and redundancy
ratio at least a bit.  It's fully acknowledged that many
mysterious behaviours are just a sum of the behaviours of
the underlying components, and sometimes the web search
will fail for some, so it's entirely OK bring up such points
up, but even better if done so in a somewhat considerate
way.

User friendliness of the HA components is also relevant,
so the better the diagnostics and documentation are to 
realize the mechanisms involved and their causal principles,
the less question marks are to arise, sure, and that's
why we need to work also on that front, it's admittedly
not a one way street (and I don't want to sound harsh
towards the audience, especially since I can also be
blamed for contributing to the current state there -- I'd
just prefer it if the lists could work at some productive
level basis, since this is not exactly a hot-line service).

-- 
Jan (Poki)
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