I hope Andrew wanted to maintain the software again and didn't just feel obligated after what happened to xz. In any case, Andrew Tridgell's contributions to open source, both direct and indirect (Git), are substantial. Hopefully he's still enjoying himself!
I had the pleasure of meeting Andrew during the height of the 3D Robotics days, and spending time pair-programming with him on a GPS Driver for ArduPilot. It was incredible to see his confidence in moving around the codebase, making edits. It left an impression on me, it was watching someone who really knew what he was doing. I was inspired. He was also very jovial and fun.
I also remember how concerned he was about the safety of flying vehicles. We were all on the rooftop of a building in Berkeley showing off hackathon projects on drones. He was pointedly staying under the one roof overhang, telling people that this is definitely unsafe. Minutes later someone crashed a drone at full speed into a utility pole, sending shrapnel
and lithium battery chunks everywhere. How it didn't catch fire I'll never know. I think 3DR was a little cowboy for his taste at times, he.
Tridge, if you read this, it was a real pleasure working with you!
Well over a decade or so ago I hit some problems syncing large filesystems. I think it could fail if it didn't have enough memory on the server to hold all the file metadata because it did all the metadata comparisons before examining any of the block checksums. Server memory is a lot cheaper now but even so if it still works this way it would nice if this was improved.
