If somebody is going to make a specific claim, in a published document, about another project having or not having a feature, then damn right they should Google for the combination. A lot of OSS projects end up having pieces of information scattered all over presentations and blog posts and who the hell knows what else. All of your goalpost-moving about what should be on the Gluster website doesn't change the fact that Infinit's characterization was inaccurate and trivially revealed as such by a single obvious Google search.
You're semi-right here. People saying why their offering is better than competitors better know what the competition offers. Marketing 101 says dig deep to find that plus differentiators. That much I agree with.
That said, your excuse for GlusterFS site being screwed up is that other projects are screwups, too. Makes no sense. Let's put it into perspective: Gluster people could spend under 5 minutes typing up and posting that page. Instead, they expect all potential users or contributors to spend 10m-1hr digginh through docs for same information. Meanwhile, many FOSS pages state clearly what their software does.
So, no excuses. It's just laziness and foolish on top of that given they want more adoption of a tool they won't describe haha. The responsibility is on them to present their work in a clear way given that goal. They're failing on that right now.
It's easy to criticize when you've never worked on the kind of infrastructure that Gluster has. Yeah, for a project I'm doing all by myself it would take all of five minutes to update the web page with that sort of information. Hey look, that's exactly how it happened when this was part of a project I was doing myself.
Now, on a huge project with the website and docs with separate owners subject to their own detailed standards and review processes, it's not that easy. Even as one of the Gluster project architects, it would take me more than a few minutes to make even a trivial change, and that would be time taken away from other tasks for which my personal expertise is even more necessary. Yes, it's a problem - one shared to varying degrees by most projects of this scale. Here's the fantastically informative website for the Linux kernel.
They don't have links to specific features on the front page, either. Good luck finding the docs about XFS project quota, starting from there. Would it be responsible for me to claim it doesn't exist, based only on what I can get by clicking around on kernel.org? I could come up with similar examples for many features on Apache or Mozilla or OpenStack projects as well. The fact is that technical debt exists for documentation as well as for code, and keeping it all coherent becomes exponentially more difficult as the project grows.
But none of that has anything to do with the original point. What's the point of complaining about Gluster here? How could you possibly believe that's helpful, unless you believe people should be grateful for every moment of your attention? This story is about Infinit. Let's keep the focus on them, and their claims, and whether those claims are accurate.
"It's easy to criticize when you've never worked on the kind of infrastructure that Gluster has. "
It's easy to critize if I've ever done one essay, research paper, marketing piece, commercial project... many things where I took the time to document and explain what I was presenting. Often in an ad hoc was as it was a secondary focus. I don't have to work on a specific product to understand a common skill or requirement.
"Here's the fantastically informative website for the Linux kernel."
"based only on what I can get by clicking around on kernel.org? I could come up with similar examples for many features on Apache or Mozilla or OpenStack projects as well. "
You cite an example from a group that famously doesn't give a damn what people think which also expect people to know what their project is already. Also an outlier in general. Then some others whose sites at least explain what they do with key features. Unlike Gluster. You grasped at straws more than I expected.
"Hey look, that's exactly how it happened when this was part of a project I was doing myself."
You did exactly what I'm asking them to do. More actually. Your site supports my position albeit half the links in the paper/slides set didn't work. Maybe it's NoScript but one or two told me what I needed to know. How about some examples of how easy it is on big, collaborative projects:
(OwnCloud since the OP blog post mentioned it as a competitor.)
"But none of that has anything to do with the original point. "
Your original point was that the author should've been responsible enough to do research, identify key features of Gluster, and consider them before making claims in the post. You also argued against Gluster site author(s) needing to be responsible enough to identify the key features and list them on the website for people like author doing research. You then made excuses for them despite that being quite easy and considered good practice. So, I'm addressing both the poor research by Infinit author and poor docs by Gluster that contributes to it, along with your double standard on the topic. I'm adding counter-examples to sites in and outside their domain with varying organizations and team sizes to show how they could improve.
Had they had good materials to draw on, I'd have never argued with your claim that author should've known what features they do or don't have. Or maybe if you slammed them for irresponsibility as you did the author. Seemed to be a bias, though, along with OSS documentation problem worth noting.
