[llvm-dev] GitHub Survey?

[Renato Golin via llvm-dev]

On 8 September 2016 at 19:10, Chris Bieneman <cbieneman at apple.com> wrote:
> My personal preference would be for the decision makers to be either a
> committee of developers or the LLVM Foundation board, and I would prefer if
> the survey were crafted to provide them with information to inform a
> decision, rather than a dictation of a decision.

Hi Chris,

Those are very good points, and I agree with you.

In line with Chris Lattner's previous comments, that this is a purely
technical decision with far reaching consequences, I think the
foundation should continue its role as helpers and not decision
makers. However, we don't yet have a process of forming technical
committees for such cases, and given the delicate nature of this
decision (illustrated by the number of long and heated threads), it
won't be an easy process either. It's quite possible that the
discussions on how to form a representative committee will be as
heated or more so than the git discussion.

Picking code owners or top committers as a base would put out a lot of
people that work hard on LLVM but never ended up owning a piece of
code and would be telling that committing a lof of patches is somehow
better than a few well done and life changing ones. Maybe we do need
to start a parallel discussion on how would this technical committee
would look like, so we can take such decisions while still being
representative with more ease in the future. But none of that is fast
enough, I think.

The only easy solution I can see right now, is for Chris Lattner to
decide, based on both the survey and the BoF. I personally trust Chris
to take a decision that will be best for the community, but I
obviously don't speak for the whole community.

In that case, a voting-in-survey-clothing may not be a bad idea, as
it'll give us an idea of numbers. But we'll need more specific
questions and they can be slightly less statistically relevant, since
the decision process will not rely on them being representative.

Can you suggest a few additional questions to the survey? We had a lot
of feedback in the beginning, but the last one was several weeks ago.

I've added Chris as an editor, Tanya had access already. I don't want
to be the only editor in this, and it'd be good if they could change
it to suit the kind of information a committee/person would be looking
into.

cheers,
--renato