[ale] RH Satellite 6 moron's intro?

[James Sumners]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 8:27 PM, Scott McBrien <smcbrien at gmail.com> wrote:

> There's a reason why RH sales recommends a professional services
> engagement to go with the product. To be fair, they also do the same for
> Sat 5, but my impression is its more worth it right now for a sat6
> implementation.
>
> In a perfect world, yeah docs would be 100%.  But if you've worked on a
> big software project, what happens is that the docs team is reliant on the
> engineering team to provide accurate, timely information.  Also, it'd be
> nice if they also reviewed what the docs writers are writing.  Sadly, when
> you're up against a deadline, that nice process is chucked out the window
> and docs writers requests are ignored and review turns into a quick glance
> and 'Yeah, that looks right.'
>
> They're currently working on 6.1 which, from what I understand, is mostly
> UI and workflow improvements.
>
> -Scott
>

I understand you're defending your coworkers. And I understand that it's no
small undertaking to put out product like Satellite. But I'm not going to
hold back when something is being touted so prettily on the "please buy it
page" and is as expensive as it is. I don't mean any malice, I'm just
stating my experience and opinion bluntly.

Adequate documentation does not necessarily mean 100% documentation. What
is currently offered, though, is not what I consider adequate (and Ramesh
seems to be agreeing with me). Here, I'll cite an example:

The first mention of the "Products" concept is 4 chapters into the User
Guide --
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Satellite/6.0/html/User_Guide/sect-Using_Products.html

Do you see a description of what a "Product" is? Clearly this one that can
figured out by poking around the UI, but it's a clear and easy example of
what I mean when I say the documentation, in its current state, is
unacceptable. It gets worse when you start looking at  the configuration
management stuff. The configuration management has a "repositories" concept
and there is no explanation about how it differs, if it even does, to a yum
repository (although, I can't even find where I was reading about those
now).

The short of it is this: documentation is not an add-on, it's a major part
of the product. In fact, it's probably the most important part of the
product. Sure, I have a support subscription. But I have my own deadlines
and can't sit around waiting on support to read through an SOS report (or
whatever) for however long it will take them just to get past something
that should already be documented. An actual problem, "it be broke", is a
different story. That's what support is for.


-- 
James Sumners
http://james.sumners.info/ (technical profile)
http://jrfom.com/ (personal site)
http://haplo.bandcamp.com/ (band page)
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