Thought on technical documentation

Had an interesting IM exchange with a co-worker:

me: Where is the documentation describing how to get the uid of a server?
co-worker:
co-worker: I emailed it to you
me: Just a thought but email does not count as documentation. Does this exist anywhere in a doc or maybe as a puppet fact?

My co-worker has yet to respond and its been about 15 minutes.

This does raise a very interesting issue. Documentation is very important and it should be in a common location. To me, email just is not documentation - its a heads-up but not documentation.

Am I crazy that I don't like email? In fact, I actually hate it. Its a "necessary evil" but that does not mean someone can send me something and expect that I have added it to my ubermind and will hoard that data away somewhere for eternity including instant recall.

Especially when the way to find out is so freaking simple it should be made in to a puppet fact and culled in to puppet's inventory service ( http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/inventory_service.html and/or http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppetdb/1/spec_q_facts.html )

ipmitool -H ipmi_host -U ipmi_user -P ipmi_pass fru | grep 'Board Serial' | awk '{print $4}'
ABC123FGYM

( obviously, those are changed values - use your imagination :-> )