feedback about juju after using it for a few months

[Richard Harding]

On Wed, 17 Dec 2014, Caio Begotti wrote:

> Folks, I just wanted to share my experience with Juju during the last few
> months using it for real at work. I know it's pretty long but stay with me
> as I wanted to see if some of these points are bugs, design decisions or if
> we could simply to talk about them :-)

Thanks for the great feedback. I've got some replies and we'd love to help
improve the experience.


> Juju GUI:
>
> 11. Juju's GUI's bells and whistles are nice, but I think there's a bug
> with it because its statuses are inaccurate. If you set a relation, Juju
> says the relation is green and active immediately, which is not true if you
> keep tailing the log file and you know things can still fail because
> scripts are still running.

The relation is green, but if it errors after some time it should turn red
with error info. If the relation goes into an error state and it does not
then that's a bug we'd love to fix. If you could file the bug and let us
know if there's two services that this is easily replicated with that's be
awesome!

https://bugs.launchpad.net/juju-gui/+filebug

> 12. Cancelling actions on Juju's GUI does not make much sense since you
> need to click on commit, then click on clear, then confirm it. Why not
> simply having a different cancel button instead? It's like shutting down
> Windows from the start menu. The cancel button should cancel the action,
> and the actual X button should simply dismiss it. That clear button seems
> useless UX-wise?

Thanks, we'll take this feedback to the UX team. The deployment bar is a
new UX item and getting feedback on the use of it is greatly appreciated.

> 13. Juju's GUI's panel with charmstore stays open all the time wasting
> window space (so I have to zoom out virtually all my deployments because of
> the amount of wasted space, every time). There could be a way to hide that
> panel, because honestly it's useless locally since it never lists my local
> charms even if I export JUJU_REPOSITORY correctly. I'd rather have my local
> charms listed there too or just hide the panel instead.

You can hide the panel. If you type '?' a series of keyboard shortcuts come
up. One of them is to toggle the sidebar using 'ctrl-shift-h' (hide).
Please try that out and let us know if that helps or not. As we improve the
sidebar and make the added services bar more prevalent we hope the sidebar
being there is more and more useful.


> 13. Juju's GUI shows new relations info incorrectly. If I set up a DB
> relation to my service it simply says in the confirmation window that "db
> relation added between postgresql and postgresql". I've noticed sometimes
> this changes to "between myservice and myservice" so perhaps it has to do
> with the order of the relation, from what service to the other? Anyway,
> both cases seem to show it wrong?

Thanks, we'll look into this. Is there two services you can replicate this
every time or is it something that happens less consistently?

> 14. Juju's GUI always shows the service panel even if the service unit has
> been destroyed, just because I opened it once. Also, it says "1 dying
> units" (sic) forever until I close it manually.

By service panel is this the details panel that slides out from the left
sidebar? We can definitely look into making sure those go away when the
unit or service are destroyed.

> 15. Why subordinate charms don't have a color bar beneath their icons too?
> Because if it fails then it will appear in red right? Why not always
> display it to indicate it's been correctly deployed or set up?

There's a UX decision to try not to highlight subordinates unless there's an
issue because they tend to clutter the UI. With the new added services bar
and the ability to show/hide them perhaps it's something we should revisit.

> 16. Juju's GUI lists all my machines. Like, all of them, really. In the
> added services part of the panel it lists even inactive machines, which
> does not make much sense I'd say because it makes it seem only deployed
> machines are listed. I think that count is wrong.

The GUI lists the machines it knows about from Juju. I'm not sure about
hiding them because in machine view we use them for targets to deploy
things to. Now machines are only listed in machine view, but you mention
seeing them in the 'added services' panel? Do you have a screenshot of what
you mean we could take a look at?

> That's it, thank you for those who made it to the end :-D

And thank you for taking the time to write out the great feedback.

--

Rick Harding

Juju UI Engineering
https://launchpad.net/~rharding
@mitechie