Hello,
Having already posted one of the “frustrated feedbacks” I wanted to refrain from writing anything else, but this may be a good opportunity to explain my point of view.
I’d like it to be both constructive and a source of mutual understanding, even if it’s painful to read (it also may be twice as painful for many, as English isn’t my main language).
First, my message was written after wasting quite a bit of time on the new website, and before I knew there was a fallback: it didn’t help the tone, despite all the rewordings I’ve made.
As a side-note, the old version seemingly requires so much work to maintain that switching to the new version ASAP was absolutely necessary, but at the same time the old version is planned to be kept available for a while?
It seems like there’s a contradiction there, but I’m not “in” the project so I’m probably missing key elements (like, “read-only is OK”?).
But yeah, like BrainStone above I’m one of the people slowly creating their own library of roles for internal use at the companies they work for, while borrowing from time to time from the splendid library of public roles already available on Galaxy when it makes more sense, and before maybe becoming one of the public contributors later.
All this work is necessary to build up enough momentum around Ansible inside the company I work for to be able to “go to the next level” in the coming months and years (RHCE, Tower, …), and collections don’t matter to me at this stage (they’re more of a hindrance really).
On top of receiving an unexpected “stick in the wheel” from an entity proud to be “on the same side” with this update, some of us still have in mind the heated debates of last summer and felt solace in the fact that the Ansible team, at least, seemed unaffected by this shift in mindset.
But many users like me stayed on alert, and when this weird-tasting update happened… this didn’t call for a usual response either, and yes it comes from the same willingness to keep the project safe, working and usable.
As I don’t use Galaxy to find new roles very often, I don’t remember seeing a banner saying “please test the new version and tell us what you think, help us help you”: if it was there for the last few months, then maybe it wasn’t visible enough.
If I was just stupid and blanked it the same way I mentally ignore ads, then okay, I could admit that publicly.
I don’t remember either receiving an e-mail, as a registered user, telling me “beware, we’re gonna update the Galaxy website on TARGET_DATE, don’t panic and here’s what you should be expecting!”.
And right now, I don’t see a banner saying “while we’re hard at work on this new release, users looking for browsing features of the previous version can use (old URL) for the time being”. Why? Are you expecting everyone to look for the FAQ?
I only saw the “Share your feedback” banner and, guess what, that’s exactly what I did in the way the website’s UX intended me to do, as in “without reading anything else first”.
When I asked “are the developers of the new website even Ansible users?” in my previous post, it was a real question and not an assumption on the developers’ skills, as for me a user would have put filters and sorting options at the very top of the “beta release” checklist (not the “alpha” checklist, I’m not a monster).
I still can’t understand what happened here and, yes, a post-mortem of the launch could be interesting when you’re ready to talk about it.
But after my first message, seeing how both role users and roles developers have issues with -NG, one can only wonder how the release cycle got handled and if the release wasn’t rushed because of a sudden deadline from above: it happens, we’ve all been there, and if it’s the case we know you can’t admit it publicly (but it would still be concerning regarding the direction of the project).
If no rollback is easily doable for the time being, first I assume it means that -NG could be “fixed” rather quickly so it’s good news, but is it really better for you to have to (I suppose) manually fix the issues popping up in new role updates in the meantime?
I’m just a small fry here among giants, but as someone who spent a few years in web development, most of their professional life as a sysadmin, often used FOSS and sometimes contributed to it (code, translations and money) for more than 20 years now (…yeah), the final key points to understand my previous post, this one and maybe some future ones (I hope not):
- I have no idea how much of the work and decisions regarding Galaxy are made by Red Hat employees having to follow decisions from someone at Product Management who isn’t a product user, but I suppose it’s the vast majority. I may be wrong. But I’m sure RH practices dogfooding well enough to see and report most Galaxy-NG issues internally.
- I would never have allowed myself to publish that version if I was in charge of it (but on the other hand, maybe nothing wouldn’t have come out at all due to too much perfectionism, I know that all too well).
- Even if I was OK with it, most bosses I’ve had would’ve been very hard on me if I suggested to go live with it: they would’ve seen early on in the project that the deadline wasn’t realistic enough and acted accordingly.
- I salute the work you’re currently doing, probably way ahead of schedule and maybe even at the detriment of your own free time, but it still should’ve preceded the public release.
- I don’t think messing up something and using “please don’t be mean” as a shield is a responsible answer, both in paid and volunteer work, as harsh as it may sound.
- I’m sure some of you are already harsh enough with yourselves and don’t need a clown like me to add anything, but if you’re in this situation then I believe you have a clean conscience already and I’d buy you a drink if I could.
- I ultimately believe that someone, somewhere, took an unwise decision and thought that having the devs deal with the aftermath was the smartest solution. I may be wrong, again. But if not, it still calls for some form of (as polite as possible) protest to avoid it happening again, for the benefit of both the website users (role users and developers) and the website devs.
- It’s not too late to communicate outside of this forum, but I know it would be like admitting that everything wasn’t perfect, and that any communication that’s not 100% positive may need to be approved/rewritten/respinned by many corporate layers (especially since last summer).
Sorry if it’s not the constructive feedback you were looking for, and cheers to everyone.
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and yes its broken as hell. I am pretty sure most people using this work in IT. So to say that i have a hard time connecting the dots says enough.
getting through them 