iX systems always has had a "GUI first, official API and CLI second" approach and has never had much official support for external CLI tools.
iX also always picked solutions that are interesting for their enterprise users and tried to make those more-or-less accessable to their home-users.
So I don't really see why iX is getting flag for doing what they always did, because it just happens to be something people don't (yet) have experience with. You did't see people complainigng this much with jails and plugins. Why? Because most people didn't know those so hadn't made up their minds yet.
It's all pretty useless feedback, because no one is actually able to give a good reason on why they need it. It's all based on "I already know this" or "more examples on the internet".
That being said:
People seem to forget that they aren't the audience that iX is making money on: Enterprises are. And like Morgan said: They do not use docker-compose at all.
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But lets ignore all that for a moment:
How many people here even tried the new solutions like Helm and SCALE Apps yet and tried to actively(!) participate in improving the user experience on those?
With TrueCharts we are actively working on an aggregated improvement list for TrueNAS SCALE Apps and to be honest: we don't really see much constructive feedback on improvements at all.
What
actual things do you guys find missing in the current system,
BESIDES that it just isn't the same as your current system?
I've been quite thorough to go through docker-compose files for TrueCharts to try and assure feature-parity when I can.
There are 2 area's that keep being a bit different:
-mount-only storage vs managed-PVC and mounted storage
- Reverse-Proxy setups vs Ingress
(those are also the area's kompose shits itself though)
But that considered I'm hard pressed to find significant area's that are
inherently incompatible.
In short:
Are the people crying out for docker-compose support, actually having a problem or just want your solution because "muh solution"? Because thats the feeling I get.
To try to understand the
Why from my perspective is probably best summed up by the table below. This is very much a rough and ready reckoner; nothing more. What I did was to consider two popular applications that could be served through container orchestration. I went to their support forums and searched for the four terms in the top row of the table and noted how many search results were returned.
search terms | docker | docker-compose | kubernetes | helm chart |
Nextcloud | 500+ | 500+ | 78 | 20 |
WordPress | 1220 | 92 | 153 | 5 |
Yeah, the problem here is that you are looking at the official locations. Thats not how Helm or K8S support is handled. It's a cultural difference mostly.
For K8S resources look at Bitnami or K8S-At-Home instead. ;-)
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Problem first vs Solution first:
As might be clear from this, I'm a strong proponent of defining the actual problems first and finding solutions for those afterwards.
In the almost 100 messages this week about this I only got one solid "problem":
- Documentation (either external resources or by iX) is not on-par. (By
@Basil Hendroff)
Documentation:
You guys know what: I actually agree. Documentation for everything K8S SUCKS BALLS. and iX docs for SCALE often barely exist or are not indepth enough for users to figure out how to port more complex apps like Pihole (which prefers/requires port 53 forwards).
iX also neglected for ages to remove the many docker references from their PR and still hasn't had a good guide about migrating from docker-compose to their big-blue-button (that wouldn't even be possible because many ports cannot be forwarded using that tool.
However:
In the last weeks
@StavrosMadK and I, have been working quite hard to get some actually solid quick-start guides out for TrueNAS SCALE Apps. The goal is to make it easier for a new user(!) to start using SCALE Apps than to start using docker-compose. But, at the same time, make it more clear for docker-compose users to figure out where to copy-and-paste specific settings from their docker-compose file.
Daily(!) walkthrough video's have been releasing for a while now and more will follow upcomming week(s):
Those video's are mostly aimed to be viewed in comparison to writhen quick-start guides though, those are somewhat available here:
Project Documentation for TrueCharts
truecharts.org
(minus video's that aren't released yet ofc ;-) )