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.
This problem is pretty common across most parts of the Linux space. Everyone wants to volunteer coding work, which is great, but not what’s desperately needed right now.
The Linux community needs more than programmers, or else it will consist only of programmers. We need UI/UX experts, or we’ll never have the simplicity and ease of use of iOS. We need accessibility designers or we’ll never match up to the accessibility of MacOS. We need graphic designers and artists or we’ll never look as good as Windows 11. We need PR professionals and marketing experts or we’ll never be as notable as the Windows XP startup sound.
We don’t have enough volunteers that fit into these categories. The next best thing you can do is contribute your money so that your favourite project can hire the people they need.
there’s https://bountysource.com/ or https://www.vamp.sh/
Bound to specific problems and limited to projects willing to pay money.
How does someone like me, a PhD candidate who has a background in Human-Computer Interaction, contribute? Or the accessibility researchers I collaborate with who sit one office down and use and love Linux and make their own hacks for Linux to improve its accessibility?
I think part of the problem is a matchmaking (as as you said a PR) problem. I’m sure a lot of the experts you describe would love to contribute some cycles (including myself) but your post is the first time I’m hearing that people like me are needed in my HCI capacity. Otherwise I would have assumed there are plenty of programmers better than me available so why bother?
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.
