[proposal] Improve the User Experience

[FrankLeeeee]

Proposal

Overview

In proposal #2573 , I have listed several aspects on how we can improve the user experience. In this doc, I will talk about how to improve the project from the user's perspective. As seen in the previous issues, there are mainly four types of problems:

1. installation failure
2. documentation is confusing and outdated
3. example failure
4. API/function not working well

In this doc, I will mainly talk about the first three points. The last point should have a separate documentation to discuss in detail.

Installation

As many users have encountered strange failure during installation, we want to simplify the installation process. Some actions can be taken:

1. support runtime kernel build
2. release on pypi
3. remove pre-built release on our pypi source
4. check pypi installation from test-pypi
5. give clearer error messages

1 and 2 have already been completed, so we will focus on 3-5 to make the installation process easier.

Documentation

The documentation is currently maintained in another repository. However, some problems persist:

1. documentation is not tested
2. algolio crawler + search sometimes fails for unknown reasons
3. documentation release is not updated with the colossalai release
4. difficult for users to contribute
5. write tutorials with detailed api doc

Perhaps, it will be better to switch to Read the Docs instead of self-hosted docusaurus.

Example

For examples, we should do two things:

1. Add regular checks for example code
2. remove outdated examples as we update the API
3. polish the readme for understandability

Future Plan

ID	Type	Description	Issue Number
1	Installation	Fixed version meta mistach	#2570
2	Installation	Remove pre-built wheels	#2636
3	Installation	add test-pypi check in release CI	#2591
4	Installation	update the error message	#2885
5	Documentation	build a new doc system	in a seperate discussion
6	Example	Update and maintain the examples/tutorials	will discuss in a separate thread

You can view the progress in https://github.com/orgs/hpcaitech/projects/14.

Self-service

• I'd be willing to do some initial work on this proposal myself.

[FrankLeeeee]

This disucssion is migrated from #2579 .