where to ask questions about Airflow

[Dennis O'Brien <de...@dennisobrien.net>]

Hi

When I think about how to get help with Airflow, I feel we are missing
something in the middle.  Here's the order I usually go through:

1. Read the documentation and/or source code.
2. Search gitter, possibly ask a question there.
3. Search the dev mailing list, possibly ask a question there.
4. File a Jira ticket.

Before the migration to Apache Incubator, we used a google group which was
great for discussions spanning a long time, and for archiving knowledge.
Gitter is really not good at this.  And the dev mailing list is fine but
it's not a great UI, there's no search, etc.

I think we need something between steps 2 and 3 that's focused on users.
As an example, Pandas encourages posting questions on stackoverflow.  As a
result there's a huge body of curated knowledge there.

I'm not sure what the best solution is.  I'm not even sure that others see
this as a problem that needs to be addressed.  I'm curious what other
people think.

thanks,
Dennis

Re: where to ask questions about Airflow

[Ben Hoyt <be...@gmail.com>]

I had the exact same thought and step-by-step process (see my previous
email to the dev mailing list about release schedule etc), so it's
definitely an issue. The dev mailing list is pretty hidden away and hard to
search.

I agree StackOverflow would be good, assuming we could get some core devs
and core users to pay attention to it. There are one or two questions
posted per day on there: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/airflow

Some of the documentation is a bit out of date or patchy. While it'd be
nice to perfect the documentation, some good, searchable place to ask
questions would really help. For example, how to migrate your database when
upgrading versions.

For me it was relatively high friction: I'd never used Gitter, so I had to
sign up to Twitter (I couldn't tell, but it seemed Gitter wanted access to
my GitHub organizations if I signed up using GitHub). Then before creating
a JIRA ticket I had to sign up there too. I guess the latter is kind of
okay, as maybe creating tickets should have a bit more friction.

-Ben

On Fri, Dec 2, 2016 at 2:45 PM, Dennis O'Brien <de...@dennisobrien.net>
wrote:

> Hi
>
> When I think about how to get help with Airflow, I feel we are missing
> something in the middle.  Here's the order I usually go through:
>
> 1. Read the documentation and/or source code.
> 2. Search gitter, possibly ask a question there.
> 3. Search the dev mailing list, possibly ask a question there.
> 4. File a Jira ticket.
>
> Before the migration to Apache Incubator, we used a google group which was
> great for discussions spanning a long time, and for archiving knowledge.
> Gitter is really not good at this.  And the dev mailing list is fine but
> it's not a great UI, there's no search, etc.
>
> I think we need something between steps 2 and 3 that's focused on users.
> As an example, Pandas encourages posting questions on stackoverflow.  As a
> result there's a huge body of curated knowledge there.
>
> I'm not sure what the best solution is.  I'm not even sure that others see
> this as a problem that needs to be addressed.  I'm curious what other
> people think.
>
> thanks,
> Dennis
>