I’m going to bring down my work volume around OSS to a minimum, specifically when it comes to orchestrator and gh-ost. This is to explain the whats and hows so that users are as informed as possible. TL;DR a period of time I will not respond to issues, will not review pull requests, will not produce releases, will not answer on mailing lists. That period of time is undefined. Could be as short as a few weeks, could be months, more, an unknown.
The “What”
Both orchestrator and gh-ost are popular tools in the MySQL ecosystem. They enjoy widespread adoption and are known to be used at prominent companies. Time and again I learn of more users of these projects. I used to keep a show-off list, I lost track since.
With wide adoption comes community engagement. This comes in the form of questions (“How do I…”, “Why does this not work…”, “Is it possible to…”), issues (crashing or data integrity bugs, locking issues, performance issues, etc.), suggestions (support this or that) and finally pull requests.
At this time, there’s multiple engagements per day. Between these two projects I estimate more than a full time job addressing those user interactions. That’s a full time job volume on top of an already existing full time job.
Much of this work went on employer’s time, but I have other responsibilities at work, too, and there is no room for a full-time-plus work on these projects. Responding to all community requests is unsustainable and futile. Some issues are left unanswered. Some pull requests are left open.
Even more demanding than time is context. To address a user’s bug report I’d need to re-familiarize myself with 5-year old code. That takes the toll of time but also memory and context switch. As community interaction goes, a simple discussion on an Issue can span multiple days. During those days I’d jump in and out of context. With multiple daily engagements this would mean re-familiarizing myself with different areas of the code, being able to justify a certain behavior; or have good arguments to why we should or should not change it; being able to simulate a scenario in my brain (I don’t have access to users’ environments); comprehend potential scenarios and understand what could break as result of what change — I don’t have and can’t practically have the tests to cover the myriad of scenarios, deployments, software, network and overall infrastructure in all users environments.
Even if I set designated time for community work, this still takes a toll on my daily tasks. The need to have a mental projection in your brain for all that’s open and all that’s to come makes it harder to free my mind and work on a new problem, to really immerse myself in thought, to create something new.
When? For how long?
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