I’ve said this previously, and I’ll say it again: we’re severely under-resourced. Not just XFS, the whole fsdevel community. As a developer and later a maintainer, I’ve learnt the hard way that there is a very large amount of non-coding work is necessary to build a good filesystem. There’s enough not-really-coding work for several people. Instead, we lean hard on maintainers to do all that work. That might’ve worked acceptably for the first 20 years, but it doesn’t now.
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Dave and I are both burned out. I’m not sure Dave ever got past the 2017 burnout that lead to his resignation. Remarkably, he’s still around. Is this (extended burnout) where I want to be in 2024? 2030? Hell no.
There are so many filesystems. So. Many.
Have any of them considered actually dropping some and pooling efforts into the more promising ones?
Isn’t “anyone can fork if a project doesn’t really fit their taste” sort of the curse of open source?
Swallowing your pride, merging into another project and taking a less glamorous role in that project is not as easy as it was to fork when steering your project.
This is generally speaking. I’m definitively not saying any of this is that case with the XFS project.
Ps. Murdering your wife is also something that seems to be bad for filesystems…
Swallowing your pride, merging into another project and taking a less glamorous role in that project is not as easy as it was to fork when steering your project.
I don’t think it’s because of the ego. But if you’re working with other people, you need to do a lot of non-coding (non-fun) things. Align thinking, find compromises, establish and follow processes. Things are easier and more fun hacking alone. No processes to limit you, no one telling you “this doesn’t align with the vision of the project” (and the other way round - you don’t have to maintain code contributed by other people with use cases not interesting to you) etc. For volunteer FOSS contributors, doing fun stuff is often a big part of the motivation to give their free time to the community.
