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?
Effective immediately. I made some promises, and there’s a bunch of open issues and pull requests I intend to pursue, but going forward I’m going to disengage from further questions/requests/suggestions. I’m gonna turn off repo notifications and not get anything in my mailbox.
My intention is to step back, truly disengage, and see what happens. There’s a good chance (this happened before) that after some time I feel the itch to come back to working on these projects. Absolutely no commitments made here.
What does this mean for orchestrator?
After 7 years of maintaining this project, first at Outbrain, then Booking.com, then GitHub and now at PlanetScale, I’m gonna step back and refrain from new developments, from responding to issues, from answering questions, from reviewing pull requests.
I should mention that in the past year or so, I’ve merged more community contributions than my own. That’s staggering! There are very capable contributors to this project.
In essence, the core of orchestrator hasn’t changed in a while. The main logic remains the same. I suspect orchestratorwill remain effective for time to come. I am sure some users will be alarmed at this post, and wonder whether they should keep using orchestrator or search for other solutions. I am in no position to make a suggestion. Users should carefully evaluate what’s in their best interests, what they deem to be stable and reliable software, what they deem to be supported or repairable, etc.
What does this mean for gh-ost?
I co-designed and co-authored gh-ost at GitHub (announcement) as part of the database infrastructure team. We wrote gh-ost to solve a pressing issue of schema changes at GitHub, and were happy to open source it. This led to, frankly, an overwhelming response from the community, with very fast adoption. Within the first few months we received invaluable feedback, bug reports, suggestions, all of which had direct and positive impact to gh-ost.
I’m not working at GitHub anymore, and I’m not an official maintainer of the upstream repo anymore. I do not have the authority to merge PRs or close issues. It is as it should be, the project is owned by GitHub.
I use gh-ost as part of my current job at PlanetScale working on OSS Vitess. Vitess utilizes gh-ost for online DDL. I therefore am an interested party in gh-ost, most specifically to ensure it is correct and sound. For this reason, I selectively engage with users on GitHub’s repo, especially when it comes to issues I consider important for Vitess.
I do maintain a fork, where I either interact with users, or push my own changes. I collaborate with the GitHub team, contribute upstream changes I make on my fork, and pull changes downstream. The GitHub team is kind enough to accept my contributions and invest time in testing and evaluating what might be risky changes. The upstream and downstream code is mostly in sync.
Going forward I will continue to work on things critical to my current job, but otherwise I’ll be stepping away and reduce interactions. This means I will not accept pull requests or answer questions. The upstream gh-ost repo remains under GitHub’s ownership and maintained by GitHub’s engineers. It is not in my authority to say how the upstream project will engage with the community and I do not presume to make suggestions.
On community interaction
I must say that I’m thoroughly humbled and grateful for the interactions on these projects. I hear of other OSS projects suffering abuse, but my work has seen respectful, thoughtful, empowering and inspiring user interactions. The majority of users invest time and thought in articulating an issue, or engage in respectful discussion while suggesting changes. I’ve actually “met” people through these interactions. I can only hope I payed back in same coin.
On community assistance
Community also provides assistance in several forms. The simplest and truly most helpful is by answering questions. Some community members will respond on issues, or on mailing lists, in chat rooms. Some users will identify similar issues to their own, opened by other users, will discuss and help each other, and share information.
Some companies and users are consistent contributors, working on issues that are both specific to their particular needs, as well as ultimately useful for the greater community.
At a previous time where I was overwhelmed with OSS/community work, two prominent companies, let’s call them S and P, stepped forward to offer actual development time; assign their own engineers part-time for a limited period to help pushing forward. I’m forever grateful for their kindness! I didn’t take those offers back then, because I didn’t have a good plan (I still don’t) for coordinating that kind of work; it felt like it would take even more efforts to set it up.
Can we jump in as contributors?
I don’t have a good plan for making this work, or for ensuring that this works well. I prefer that users fork orchestrator, and to not bring in contributors to this repo. If a contributor does have a solid plan, you probably know where to find me.