From Target, this brass finish floor lamp evokes 60's modernism, updated for the mid-Anthropocene with a touch plate switch.

The integrated microcontroller consumes a mere 2.2 watts while the lamp is turned off, in order to allow you to turn the lamp on with a stylish flick. With a 5 watt LED bulb (sold separately), the lamp will total a mere 7.2 watts while on, making it extremely energy efficient. While off, the lamp consumes a mere 19 kilowatt-hours per year.

Though the lamp shade at first appears perhaps flimsy, while you are drilling a hole in it to add a physical switch, you will discover metal, though not brass all the way through. Indeed, this lamp should last for generations, should the planet continue to support human life for that long.

As an additional bonus, the small plastic project box that comes free in this lamp will delight any electrical enthusiast. As will the approximately 1 hour conversion process to delete the touch switch phantom load. The 2 cubic foot of syrofoam packaging is less delightful.

Two allen screws attach the pole to the base; one was missing in my lamp. Also, while the base is very heavily weighted, the lamp still rocks a bit when using the aftermarket switch. So I am forced to give it a mere 4 out of 5 stars.

Last week I found myself in the uncomfortable position of many users strongly disagreeing with a decision I had made about git-annex. It felt much like a pile-on of them vs me, strong language was being deployed, and it was starting to get mentioned in multiple places on the website, in ways I felt would lead to fear, uncertainty, and doubt when other users saw it.

It did not help that I had dental implant surgery recently, and was still more in recovery than I knew when I finally tackled looking at this long thread. So it hit hard.

I've been involved in software projects that have a sometimes adversarial relationship with their users. At times, Debian has been one. I don't know if it is today, but I remember being on #debian and #debian-devel, or debian-user@lists and debian-devel@lists, and seeing two almost entirely diverged communities who were interacting only begrudgingly and with friction.

I don't want that in any of my projects now. My perspective on the history of git-annex is that most of the best developments have come after I made a not great decision or a mistake and got user feedback, and we talked it over and found a way to improve things, leading to a better result than would have been possible without the original mistake, much how a broken bone heals stronger. So this felt wrong, wrong, wrong.

Part of the problem with this discussion was that, though I'd tried to explain the constraints that led to the design decision -- which I'd made well over three years ago -- not everyone was able to follow that or engage with it constructively. Largely, I think because git-annex has a lot more users now, with a wider set of viewpoints. (Which is generally why Debian has to split off user discussions of course.) The users are more fearful of change than earlier adopters tended to be, and have more to lose if git-annex stops meeting their use case. They're invested in it, and so defensive of how they want it to work.

It also doesn't help that, surgery aside, I lack time to keep up with every discussion about git-annex now, if I'm going to also develop it. Just looking at the website tends to eat an entire day with maybe a couple bug fixes and some support answers being the only productive result. So, I have stepped back from following the git-annex website at all, for now. (I'll eventually start looking at parts of it again I'm sure.)

I did find enough value in the thread that I was able to develop a fix that should meet everyone's needs, as I now understand them (released in version 7.20191024). I actually come away with entirely new use cases; I did not realize that some users would perhaps use git-annex for a single large file in a repository otherwise kept entirely in git. Or quite how many users mix storing files in git and git-annex, which I have always seen as somewhat of an exception aside from the odd dotfile.

So the open questions are: How do I keep up with discussion and support traffic now; can I find someone to provide lower-level support and filtering or something? (Good news is, some funding could probably be arranged.) How do I prevent the git-annex community fracturing along users/developer lines as it grows, given that I don't want to work within such a fractured community?

I've been working on git-annex for 9 years this week. Have I avoided burning out? Probably, but maybe too early to tell. I think that being able to ask these questions is a good thing. I'd appreciate hearing from anyone who has grappled with these issues in their own software communities.