Re: experience getting 0.8 perf scripts running

[Jun Rao <ju...@gmail.com>]

Hi, Bill,

Thanks for sharing your experience. Yes, our documentation can definitely
be improved. As for your suggestion, I have

1. modified the producer example wiki (
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/0.8.0+Producer+Example)
to fix Partitioner.
2. marked the quickstart wiki page as obsolete.
3. filed KAFKA-1619 to fix the perf jar (the perf dir can actually be
removed).

As for signing during build, you can bypass it by specifying "-x
signArchives", which is described in README.md. Let me know if this needs
to be explicitly specified in any existing documentation.

Thanks,

Jun



On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 5:53 AM, Bill de hÓra <bi...@dehora.net> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On twitter recently [1] I said I'd send on a list of things that made
> getting 0.8 setup for a quick bench awkward. Individually they're all minor
> and I apologize if this seem like nitpicking. But in sum, getting through
> them was a bit of a chore; it took maybe just short of a couple of hours
> and a strong cup of coffee get to log stream nirvana :)
>
> Anyway, here's a list of things that tripped me up -
>
>   - It seems like the 0.8 docs are in transition, or old docs have been
> abandoned. There is some information on cwiki.apache.org and some on
> kafka.apache.org. When I searched it was hit and miss which I landed on.
>
>   - The quickstart on cwiki.apache.org looks very wrong. It still shows
> sbt, but the project builds with gradle, the kafka-create-topic.sh params
> are wrong, the producer example's Partitioner has a generic param but
> Partitioner in the code doesn't have one, etc.
>
>   - Some stuff on kafka.apache org also looked wrong, eg creating topics
> in https://kafka.apache.org/08/quickstart.html, broken link to
> http://kafka.apache.org/projects.html, the link back to the code example
> on cwiki.
>
>   - The Kafka 0.8 binaries ship with perf scripts, but not perf lib.
>
>   - A download for the perf lib wasn't anywhere I could see on the site (
> http://kafka.apache.org/downloads.html) - you'd have to know to search
> maven, or checkout Kafka and build it, and then put the jar into the lib
> area.
>
>   - The project doesn't work/build with java 8 afaict, or didn't for me;
> there didn't seem to be a way to know that in advance.
>
>   - The project trunk failed to build due to some signing/license checks
> (the diff I used to get things to build is here: https://gist.github.com/
> dehora/7e3c0bd75bb2b5d87557).
>
>   - The javaapi coverage is partial. Initially I wasn't sure if I had
> failed to import things from the right package before realizing I was
> looking at bad docs.
>
>   - The messages flag on the perf script is required but not marked as
> required.
>
>
> In terms of what might help others, and I'd be happy to pitch in if people
> thought they would make things easier, here's another list -
>
>   - Have working code examples for 0.8, and mention StringEncoder in the
> docs for serializer.class.
>
>   - Delete wrong information. It seems like there should be just one
> doc/wiki site and that cwiki.apache.org could be removed or marked dead
> in big friendly letters.
>
>   - Ship the perf jar with the binary, or, remove the perf scripts and
> create a separate perf distributable.
>
>   - Make the build work out of the box. It seems like the lic/singing
> checks are for publication rather than local dev. (I haven't tried the
> instructions to setup in an IDE yet).
>
> Bill
>
> [1] https://twitter.com/dehora/status/503207180544520193
>