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forem / selfhost

Selfhost your Forem Community on your own infrastructure 🎉
https://www.forem.com/get-started/
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
1.44k stars 172 forks source link

Update README with explicit expected experience #9

Closed andygeorge closed 3 years ago

djuber commented 3 years ago

Self-assessment of technical competence is going to close the door to people who were competent enough to use the repo successfully, while not being ready to contribute, or those having higher standards for themselves than they needed to.

Maybe clarify that "while the recipes and scripts here are expected to work for the limited scenarios we tested against, modification of the recipes, or altering the deployed environment, may require familiarity with the following layers of the tech stack we built with", and "ongoing maintenance of the deployed system may require interacting with any of these technologies"?

I'm all in favor of the "forem is complex software", that echos language in other projects. I just worry we're gatekeeping by requiring "high familiarity" with a long list of technologies. I suspect that the number of internally successful test deployments would indicate users of the repo can succeed with just the instructions and a willingness to interact with the server.

Someone who can read the playbooks (whether they could write it) and can connect to the server and type commands (which they may have copied from the playbooks) will probably do fine, without a lot of familiarity with podman and only enough systemd experience to start and stop services on a system (falls under general linux admin competence).

I think a lot of these listed technologies are going to be only "nice to have" for edge cases, where you can just ignore those parts in most cases, while "can install and run ansible successfully" and "can connect using ssh and manage a linux system" is probably enough to follow the happy path of installing forem to supported infrastructure.

andygeorge commented 3 years ago

Maybe clarify that "while the recipes and scripts here are expected to work for the limited scenarios we tested against, modification of the recipes, or altering the deployed environment, may require familiarity with the following layers of the tech stack we built with", and "ongoing maintenance of the deployed system may require interacting with any of these technologies"?

+1 to this language, I'll get that in

I just worry we're gatekeeping by requiring "high familiarity" with a long list of technologies.

Agree that high familiarity is not the best phrase here, I'll change that. IMO we do still want to call out that list of technologies with some level of experience - we know that internal testing by those without much Ansible experience was difficult and required some level of assistance.

pkfrank commented 3 years ago

we know that internal testing by those without much Ansible experience was difficult and required some level of assistance.

My $0.02 — while this is true, the internal testing folks (myself included) were going through it without the assistance of deeper guides and walkthroughs. With more tutorials from @cmgorton and others, I imagine we'll be able to make selfhosting increasingly accessible.

andygeorge commented 3 years ago

@pkfrank agreed, and that's some of the impetus behind this PR - those tutorials and outside guidance are not (yet?) part of this repo, so it is important to set some technical expectations for those using the repo by itself.