<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>I have concerns about this proposal. Those concerns aren't
necessarily unaddressable, but I do want to share them. My
concerns fall into two broad categories.</p>
<p>The first category is the process one. My understanding when the
LLVM foundation was established was that the role of the
foundation and the board was to support the community, not to make
major decisions for the community. I understand there is a degree
of pragmatism we have to accept - e.g. sometimes the situation
forces our hand, and we need to act, even if in a sub-optimal way
- but this runs dangerously close to the edge of the board
dictating the solution to the community. I do want to acknowledge
that I truly do thing everyone on the board is acting in good
faith here. I'm not so much worried about the intentions of
anyone involved so much as the appearance and precedent this
sets. <br>
</p>
<p>The second category is the proposed migration itself. I'll start
by saying that the restriction in the proposal text to the *-dev
lists (explicitly excluding the *commits lists) does soften my
concerns substantially, but I'm left wondering about the long term
plan for the commit lists. As has come up in recent threads
around phabricator, I feel the commit lists play a critical role
in our development practice and, almost more importantly,
*culture* which is hard to replicate. I'm a bit worried that
this proposal if accepted will be the camel getting his nose under
the tent as it were. <br>
</p>
<p>Specific to the dev lists, I'm very hesitant about moving from
mailing lists to discourse. Why? <br>
</p>
<p>Well, the first and most basic is I'm worried about having core
infrastructure out of our own control. For all their problems,
mailing lists are widely supported, there are many
vendors/contractors available. For discourse, as far as I can
tell, there's one vendor. It's very much a take it or leave it
situation. The ability to preserve discussion archives through a
transition away from discourse someday concerns me. I regularly
and routinely need to dig back through llvm-dev threads which are
years old. I've also recently had some severely negative customer
experiences with other tools (most recently discord), and the
thought of having my employability and ability to contribute to
open source tied to my ability to get a response from customer
service teams at some third party vendor I have no leverage with,
bluntly, scares me. <br>
</p>
<p>Second, I feel that we've overstated the difficulty of
maintaining mailing lists. I have to acknowledge that I have
little first hand experience administering mailman, so maybe I'm
way off here. However, there are multiple commercial vendors
which provide mailman hosting. TBH, this seems like a case where
the foundation should simply pay for commercial hosting and
migration support to mailman3. It may be this is a lot more
expensive in practice than I'm imagining, but this feels like it
should be our default answer and that anything else (i.e.
discourse) should require major evidence of benefit over that
default to be considered.</p>
<p>Third, I'm worried that there are culture elements very tied up
in our current usage of the mailing lists. As some specific
examples, consider each of the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Discourse does not allow private responses via email. You
have to use their web interface. I spent a lot of time replying
privately to other contributors. I'm worried that, in practice,
the extra step will cause me to follow up less, and miss even
more responses. I'm particularly concerned about the impact for
new contributors. (Existing contributors, I probably have an
email address for already.)</li>
<li>Discourses does not allow cross posts (or at least, it's not
clear how to do so). At least a couple times a year, we have
design discussions which cross between sub-projects. This can
be addressed with a process change, but it needs some discussion
before the migration happens.</li>
</ul>
<p>It's not that we can't adjust our processes to the limitations of
discourse; we clearly can. My concern is all of the subtle things
we loose along the way.</p>
<p>Now that I've finished up, let me explicitly state that I don't
intend my comments here to be blocking. I don't think this is a
good idea, or at least needs further expansion before acceptance,
but I'm also not in place where I can really invest in providing a
realistic alternative. At the end of the day, pragmatism does
require that we give discretion to the folks actually investing
their own time, and energy to keep the community running. <br>
</p>
<p>Philip<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 6/1/21 1:50 PM, Tom Stellard via
llvm-dev wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:0eea88aa-27ce-0d3a-3b27-664c413226ce@redhat.com">Hi,
<br>
<br>
We recently[1] ran into some issues with the mailing lists that
caused
<br>
us to disable automatic approval of subscriptions. Over the past
few
<br>
months, the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors have been
investigating
<br>
solutions to this issue and are recommending that the project move
its
<br>
discussion forum from mailman to Discourse[2].
<br>
<br>
The proposed migration plan is to move the discussion lists (e.g
*-dev,
<br>
*-users lists) to Discourse as soon as possible. The commit email
lists
<br>
(*-commits lists) will remain on mailman until a
not-yet-determined date
<br>
in the future, after which they will be replaced by something
else.
<br>
Some commit lists alternatives include Discourse and GitHub commit
<br>
comments (but there may be others).
<br>
<br>
Here are the reasons why the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors is
<br>
recommending this change:
<br>
<br>
- The LLVM project discussion lists cannot be adequately
maintained by our
<br>
current volunteer infrastructure staff and without changes we
run the
<br>
risk of a major outage.
<br>
<br>
- We are able to make this change without significant impact to
user's or
<br>
developer's daily workflows because Discourse supports email
subscriptions
<br>
and posting (NOTE: if you are concerned that your workflow may
be impacted
<br>
by this change, please contact the Infrastructure Working
Group[3], so
<br>
they can help test your workflow with Discourse.)
<br>
<br>
- Discourse gives us additional features that will benefit the
community:
<br>
- Easy to signup and subscribe to categories
<br>
- Better moderation tools.
<br>
- Web-based user interface.
<br>
- Ability to send announcements to multiple categories to avoid
having to
<br>
cross-post community wide announcements.
<br>
<br>
- A subset of the community (MLIR) have been experimenting with
Discourse
<br>
for over a year and are able to provide feedback about this
experience
<br>
to the Board of Directors.
<br>
<br>
We did also consider one alternative, which was migrating our
lists to a
<br>
mailman hosting service. However, we concluded that with all the
work it
<br>
would take to migrate our lists to another service, it would be
better
<br>
if we moved to a service (like Discourse) that provided more
features
<br>
than what we have now.
<br>
<br>
We understand that moving to Discourse is a change for the
community and
<br>
that people may be worried about this having a negative impact on
their
<br>
participation in the project. As mentioned above, we believe that
this
<br>
change can be done without significant impact to anyone’s
workflows.
<br>
If you disagree, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group,
to
<br>
document the impact to your workflow, so we can work together to
find
<br>
a solution for your issue.
<br>
<br>
If you have any other questions or comments you can raise them on
this
<br>
thread and please keep criticisms constructive and on topic.
<br>
<br>
<br>
LLVM Foundation Board of Directors
<br>
<br>
[1]
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2021-March/149027.html">https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2021-March/149027.html</a>
<br>
[2] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.discourse.org/">https://www.discourse.org/</a>
<br>
[3] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg">https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg</a>
<br>
<br>
_______________________________________________
<br>
LLVM Developers mailing list
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org">llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org</a>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev">https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev</a>
<br>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>