Hi folks,
As this list grows, I think it is worthwhile to review some points on how it functions.
In particular, I’d like the way questions get asked to get a little more focused.
A good read here is perhaps http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html – of which, some parts may be relevant.
The big phrase to eliminate is this one: “I couldn’t get ___ to work”
This isn’t because we don’t like error reports – we love those, it’s that this phrase is (unbeknownst the question asker) - completely unhelpful in understanding what a problem actually was.
When these things are said, I need folks to elaborate. When something “doesn’t work”, what does that mean?
This is the reason we have a bug template for GitHub in fact, but we don’t have this for the mailing list.
When something doesn’t work for you, post the actual result and the expected result.
This will help us know if something different happened, nothing happened, you got a traceback, maybe there was an error message, etc.
“X did not work” is unfortunately – all intentions aside – completely unhelpful for this mailing list.
The other thing to do is always post what version of Ansible you are using. If the problem is not reproducible on the latest version of Ansible in PyPi, then stop, and don’t post. If you are running Ansible 1.2 or something, upgrade first, and then post if you have a problem on the current version.
This is meant in the nicest of possible ways – just as we are getting a lot of influx of users and data, we need information to actually be helpful, and on the mailing list, keeping asking for “what do you mean by X doesn’t work” also takes a bit of work.
Other users can help out by asking this question for us when you see it, as well as the version question 