Too much support.... Toooo many replies.... ;-) Wow 13 messages in a thread within an hour or two of posting the message. It looks like more replies to this thread than to any of the others threads bubbling along on osg-users right now, which perhaps is symptom of the problem. Thanks to those who have chased up on this threads, it's a real help from me getting overloaded.
Most of the time the list is busy, it's just a fact of life. As if users not chasing up on all online resources that might help them before they come to the list look for help. As others have observed this might be partly the osg-users lists being an easy route to getting an answer, and also just plain the people are socialable animals. Better online resources will help a bit, but it'll only help so far given that basic human nature is at play. A busy mailing list is just something we have to accept and grow to appreciate - it's one of the key assets of the OpenSceneGraph project. Burn out is a real problem. This time last year I burnout my wrists and ended up being crippled by repetitive strain injury (RSI). At that time it was just plain doing too many hours at the keyboard doing support, doing major work on viewer libraries, build systems, setting up new websites and systems... This year my RSI is on the mend. But... I'm struggling to keep on top of support, both on the mailing list and submissions. What is a struggle is the sheer range of problems that people are requesting assistance on, multi-tasking works for a couple of different topics, but not dozens at one time. The last few weeks has been an example where there has just been way too many complex and long running topics being raised at one time. The long each topic takes to resolve the more likely that it'll overlap with the next involved topic, so all to easily you end up several running concurrently. The problem for me of too many complex topics running concurrently is that I often have to be a full engaged member of the discussion, while the others working on thes topics will be likely only concerning themselves with one or at most two topics that concern them. As the community expands the ability for the community itself to come up with more complex topics to discuss goes up with it, but... since my own input is sought for most of these topics I get further and further stretched. It isn't just a time issue, it's an intellectual issue - the more you multi-task the less mental ability you available for any of the lasts. Stretch your abilities too far and you eventually don't have enough ability to solve the problems in had. I guess what we need is mutex on complex issues, be them bugs, features or just general topics. Once a locks acquired no other complex topics can be raised till the case is closed and the lock is released. Or we thread out responsibilities so I don't need to be in the loop on some many topics, the mutex locks would still be there, but for dispersed over several engineers. Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
