Going deep on charm features and quality

[Jorge O. Castro]

Now that we've got the criteria sort of handled of what we think makes
a good charm [1] we made a spreadsheet to see how we're doing. So I
picked some charms that I think are important for us to be good in,
and then we started ranking them:

https://docs.google.com/a/canonical.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AoW1nhI7IMt3dGk2WU5VM0JPNk9qbjJOM1c5VFlJbUE#gid=0

As you can see, there's a ton of yellow and red. So first off, don't
panic! We purposely want charms to be full featured and reliable, so
since we didn't know what that meant at first we really had nothing to
shoot for. Now we do, and now we know that we have a ways to go to
makes these awesome.

So I've picked this list of charms as things we can improve. This list
is by no means exhaustive, but I picked them because we absolutely
need the "web stack" charms to be solid, so that anyone deploying
django, rails, node, and so on can have a solid deployment story.
Obviously there are more language stacks we can improve on, so if
you're an expert on one and want to rock it, then by all means, do so
and let me know! The other services I felt we should have be solid,
like the databases, and things that other people generally consume
like memcached.

So what can you do to help?

Well, first off, anything on this list is up for grabs, we need help
in adding these features and capabilities to these charms. I recommend
using charm-tools and stealing heavily from newer charms (like
wordpress, hint hint). If you're maintaining a charm and want to add
it to this list and then run through and score your charm and see how
it "shapes up" then that would be great. The idea is to give people a
sense of where their charm fits with the ideal so they have something
to work for.

Obviously no charm will score well, which is fine for now, and we'll
of course need some features in juju itself to implement some of these
in an ideal manner, the idea here is to see how we're doing and start
improving things.

[1]: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/juju/2012-September/001853.html

-- 
Jorge Castro
Canonical Ltd.
http://juju.ubuntu.com