MPmpdehaan2·Aug 23, 2014
Note, I wrote the program, but I'd disagree very very strongly with this - we have a giant ton of Mac users.
I'm sorry you had install problems and had trouble reading our install chapter: http://docs.ansible.com/intro_installation.html ... I will say the docs are open source, so if you want to add a note about how to get something easier compiled on OS X or something, click the GitHub link in the upper right and you're off and running :)
We get a lot of strong positives about how awesome our docs are, so I'm really interested in what you think we could do to improve them -- but they were absolutely not modelled on Chef and Puppets. Chef has about 1000 pages of docs, Ansible covers the majority of everything in a dozen pages. Most folks get up and running (with working playbooks running real applications) in 30 minutes or an hour.
My ph
Read the rest
ilosophy on docs are mainly to address things in the order folks will want to learn things, but also make it easy to hop over sections people will not. Show examples, don't make a reference manual. Though there's a need for reference content, which is where stuff like galaxy.ansible.com content and github.com/ansible/ansible-examples steps in, so you can see it put together. More tutorials I think would still be useful in the main docs. But yeah, a discussion on what you like to see differently would be interesting.
While I do understand you have to do something to install the program, what you have to do to configure it once installed is pretty short, and the install itself should still only take a few minutes. I'll give you the fact that Macs are not Linux, but they are getting there :)
I'm interested in your Mavericks error and you should definitely stop by the list about that one, or just consider the homebrew install.
Another great thing to do since you are already are on a Mac is just start doing your development on Linux in a VM :) Not that we require it, we don't... but it's great when you've got a real package manager stock!
Another easy thing you can do is just checkout the git source and do "source ./hacking/env-setup" and then you are running straight out of source. This is what I do on OS X most of the time, and we have a large number of users that follow the development branch full time.