The Tale of Troubleshooting: Unstable Builds and Open Source Infrastructure

QuestDB, an open-source time-series database designed for high-demand environments, recently faced a series of build failures attributed to unstable connections in their Azure Pipelines setup. The issue was traced to the Maven 3.9 update, which defaulted to a new "Native" transport protocol lacking retry capabilities, unlike its predecessor, the "Wagon" transport. This change led to consistent build failures due to terminated connections during long test runs. Through detailed troubleshooting, including examining Maven's source code, a temporary fix was found by reverting to the "Wagon" transport using a specific build command flag. This discovery was reported to Apache Maven, leading to collaborative efforts with maintainers to address the issue. The experience underscored the significance of reading release notes, the value of open-source contributions, and gratitude towards the maintainers of essential software infrastructure.