I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with how hard it is to make small incremental changes to the OpenStack codebase. There are two common scenarios:

• Fixing a bug or improving some code here exposes a bug or improvable code there and down the rabbithole we go.
• A small change to address a problem leads to a spate of reviews that want lots of things in the vicinity of the small change to be changed too.

In either case a small fly-by improvement becomes a project requiring full attention.

The eventual endpoint of this process will be that I choose to not make improvements when I see them because I have neither the time nor the energy to engage in the demanded commitment.

If I do this, then there are other people who do this, and tech debt will get worse and worse.

A little while later in IRC (anonymized and edited for typos):

[1:06pm] cdent: XXX: you and the other reviewers are
breaking my spirit: what started as a very small change
about two months ago has cascaded into 3 different
patchsets, each of which just
keeps growing
[1:06pm] cdent: it's no wonder nobody wants to work on
tech debt
[1:06pm] XXX: cdent: A - I feel you pain
[1:06pm] cdent: there's little opportunity for making
incremental improvements
[1:06pm] cdent: presumably an incomplete improvement
is better than none
[1:07pm] XXX: cdent: B - if you are not up to fixing the
client, you can let it go. it didn't bother anyone before...
[1:08pm] cdent: I'm personally up for it, I'm just not sure I
can justify it on the list of things I'm supposed to be doing
[1:08pm] cdent: And I suppose that's the really my grouse:
The things I'm supposed to be doing are not allowing me
to just focus on cleaning up the mess (which is where my
heart lies)
[1:08pm] XXX: cdent: you mean, for your personal manager?
[1:09pm] cdent: work responsbilities
[1:09pm] cdent: and there's only so much time in the day
[1:09pm] XXX: cdent: that's the problem. manager keep
wanting new features, while we are still handling the code debt
[1:09pm] XXX: cdent: file a bug please. I'll try to work on it
myself
[1:09pm] • cdent nods