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.
use open source software. whenever you see potential to improve, open an issue with detailed explaination.
try to solve the problem yourself. send pull requests. adapt them according to instructions by devs. when they’re good, the will get merged.
if you use the software a lot, contribute whenever you think something is needed.
that second part is exactly why there is a lack of hci work in the linux space. Hci is a specialty, just like coding is. The standard ask of “create a pr with the code” is asking peopae who don’t typically code to do so, in addition to doing the work of researching the problm, designing a solution, and then testing that solution for suitability.
Since the only mechanism most open source projects have for accepting contribution is code, and the ask is usually for code, there is never even an opportunity to submit design work.
I think most of the time if they have a Github/Gitlab repo open to the public opening issues, they will accept an issue that merely describes a problem that needs to be fixed along with how it might be fixed.
Something like this is generally appreciated:
…and if the maintainers ask for contact info, provide it and there you go.