Those of you on this list who have been paying attention have probably
noticed a fair amount of recent activity on the list, and if you get
them, on the git commit mailing lists as well.

This is because I've been working furiously to build out a completely
fresh EFS domain at my latest consulting gig, where we are very
confident EFS is going to have a huge impact.

However, we are also going to move all of our development internal to
that firm, and I will stop making direct updates, at least on a daily
basis like I have been, to the publicly available git repositories.
Fortunately, this employer is very open source savvy, and has no
problem with us making contributions to open source.  Once we have
gone through the normal bureaucratic hoops, we should be able to
publish some of the changes we make.

This is a sort of good news and bad news scenario.    The good news is
that EFS is finally going see serious use in a large environment, for
the first time (and I am referring to OpenEFS/EFS 3, not it's
proprietary predecessor of course).   The bad news is that I will
probably not be making any external updates for a while, until we have
worked through several critical milestones, and made some progress
getting it deployed.

For the next few weeks, I'll still be updating the openefs.org git
repos, while we get the infrastructure setup to develop internally,
and when I make the transition, I'm going to cut new versions of
everything, and then walk away from it for a while.    Given that fact
that you can count the git commits made over the past year or two by
developers other than me on probably one hand (OK, maybe two, and at
best you also need one foot) this really means EFS development is
going to all but stop.

I have very mixed feelings about all this.  Part of me says "so
what?!", because everyone's ignored this code for so long, and part of
me is sad because we set some very lofty goals (and in hindsight,
absurdly foolish and optimistic) when we start the OpenEFS project.
I think the reality is that EFS is really only going to be successful
where I am currently working, because of the fact that to implement
it, you need extremely talented engineering teams in a variety of
disciplines, and in my 25 year career, I've worked in exactly one such
place where that was true.   I'm working there again now....

In summary, what this really means is that the future of OpenEFS is
going to depend in a large degree on what the rest of you do with it.
 I will stand behind the code I wrote, and answer questions about it,
and certainly do my best to make the changes we make available, but
those are no longer my highest priorities.
_______________________________________________
EFS-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.openefs.org/mailman/listinfo/efs-dev

Reply via email to