Yet more new SCALE users needing help

[Yorick]

> They've diverged, and Core is looking to stagnate to be left behind

They're completely different use cases. NAS with some jails if desired for CORE, vertical scaling; hyper-converged NAS and VMs/k3s apps including Soon(tm) horizontal scaling for SCALE.

I don't see CORE stagnating at all. It's a rock-solid storage appliance, has been and will continue to be.

People who want storage and compute and don't mind being on the bleeding edge while it all gets figured out can choose SCALE.

 

[winnielinnie]

I don't see CORE stagnating at all. It's a rock-solid storage appliance, has been and will continue to be.

Both can be true.

Core is (mostly) rock solid, at least compared to SCALE. However, in my opinion it is stagnating, while they prioritize new features, developments, and polish for SCALE.

If you peruse the bug tracker, you'll notice a pattern where fixes are applied for SCALE, but not Core. (Usually with the rationale that trying to fix/improve something on Core might cause breakage.)

"Highlighting or selecting text doesn't work in the Shell."
"Fixed for SCALE!"
"What about Core? It still has this issue."
"Nope. Fixed for SCALE. Not going to touch Core."

"Plugins are broken and/or unmaintained on Core."
"Just don't use Plugins anymore. Have you tried Apps on SCALE? They're great!"

"Oh look! Work is being done to allow non-root admin accounts."
"Cool, right? Only for SCALE."

"Nice overhaul on the menus and UI. Looks much cleaner and more organized."
"Agreed. Only for SCALE, though!"

A new feature or polish (and even "minor" bugs) shouldn't be neglected for the stalwart product due to fear "it might break something". Otherwise, it will stagnate.

Or how about... get this... a community edition of Core, in which such improvements, polish, and development will not affect nor risk anything on the enterprise product? (E.g, openSUSE to SLES, Fedora to RHEL, etc)

The enterprise customers can keep their version where selecting text in the Shell is broken, while the community users get a product in which you can actually select text as you would expect text selection to work... (The community users will act as "testers" in a sense, so when it's demonstrated that such a fix doesn't cause Armageddon, it can be merged into the enterprise product.)

If this sounds awkward, I agree. That's how I look at the relationship between Core and SCALE going forwards.

(If an alien visited us from another galaxy, and you simply described the development process, they would likely assume "Sounds like SCALE is your professional enterprise product while Core is a secondary product. No way they would have advertised features for the longest time, yet simultaneously admit they're broken and will never be fixed or maintained.")

 

[Whattteva]

Both can be true.

Core is (mostly) rock solid, at least compared to SCALE. However, in my opinion it is stagnating, while they prioritize new features, developments, and polish for SCALE.

If you peruse the bug tracker, you'll notice a pattern where fixes are applied for SCALE, but not Core. (Usually with the rationale that trying to fix/improve something on Core might cause breakage.)

"Highlighting or selecting text doesn't work in the Shell."
"Fixed for SCALE!"
"What about Core? It still has this issue."
"Nope. Fixed for SCALE. Not going to touch Core."

"Plugins are broken and/or unmaintained on Core."
"Just don't use Plugins anymore. Have you tried Apps on SCALE? They're great!"

Thanks for the laughs. But yeah, those are on point.

"Oh look! Work is being done to allow non-root admin accounts."
"Cool, right? Only for SCALE."

I actually don't mind this one. The whole disabling root account is mostly a Linuxism anyway. That being said, options are always nice to have, so I wouldn't mind it being ported to CORE as well.

"Nice overhaul on the menus and UI. Looks much cleaner and more organized."
"Agreed. Only for SCALE, though!"

I actually hate SCALE's layout. It is significantly more tedious to navigate if I need to switch between menu items under the same menu because the sub-menus don't stay in place and must be re-triggered. Sure it may look better visually.... but at the expense of user experience? I don't think it's a good trade-off at all.

Overall, I mostly agree with your post and you bring up a good point with minor bug fixes not being ported to CORE. I can totally understand the hesitance on porting big features, but minor bug fixes is standard in many development cycles of other enterprise products.

 

[awasb]

Well, that was to be expected. It all started 2018 ...