[cfe-commits] [cfe-dev] Cilk Plus Extension for Clang

[Hal Finkel]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Douglas Gregor" <dgregor at apple.com>
> To: "Hal Finkel" <hfinkel at anl.gov>
> Cc: "Chandler Carruth" <chandlerc at google.com>, cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu, "llvm cfe" <cfe-commits at cs.uiuc.edu>
> Sent: Tuesday, November 6, 2012 11:14:44 PM
> Subject: Re: [cfe-dev] [cfe-commits] Cilk Plus Extension for Clang
> 
> On Nov 6, 2012, at 7:35 PM, Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov> wrote:
> > 
> > ----- Original Message -----
> >> From: "Douglas Gregor" <dgregor at apple.com>
> >> To: "Hal Finkel" <hfinkel at anl.gov>
> >> Cc: "Chandler Carruth" <chandlerc at google.com>,
> >> cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu, "llvm cfe" <cfe-commits at cs.uiuc.edu>
> >> Sent: Tuesday, November 6, 2012 3:57:25 PM
> >> Subject: Re: [cfe-dev] [cfe-commits] Cilk Plus Extension for Clang
> >> 
> >> 
> >> On Nov 6, 2012, at 10:04 AM, Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov> wrote:
> 
> >>> Vendors should commit to ongoing support of their work, but we
> >>> should not otherwise have a 'pay to play' policy.
> >> 
> >> 
> >> It's not 'pay to play', it's a meritocracy. You have to prove both
> >> that you're willing and that you are able to provide ongoing
> >> support
> >> for your own extensions in Clang. The larger, more experimental,
> >> or
> >> more niche the extension is, the higher the burden to prove
> >> continuing support. Statements of commitment hold no sway for a
> >> community that will be tasked with ongoing maintenance if you
> >> don't
> >> live up to your commitment.
> > 
> > I was specifically responding to Chandler's statement, "Then, for
> > Intel contributors to join and engage the Clang community, taking
> > on significant maintenance work and other upstream development
> > tasks." This very clearly sounds like saying that they need to
> > help us with other stuff first, and moreover, "significant
> > maintenance work" implies significant cost. That is pay-to-play.
> > You may define meritocracy partially in terms of resource
> > commitment, and that's valid, but still implies a cost to the
> > contributor.
> > 
> > My point is that we should not be looking for "significant
> > maintenance work and other upstream development tasks" from them
> > to prove themselves. Ongoing maintenance of their extension in an
> > open public repository, with good code quality, docs and tests,
> > and a positive interaction with the community should be enough.
> 
> 
> I disagree, at least in part. I think a company as large as Intel, if
> it wants to contribute such a large vendor-specific extension, does
> need to prove that it understands how to work well with the
> open-source community. It is not a process that comes naturally to
> organizations of that size. They can engage the community either by
> making general improvements to Clang, or with targeted refactoring
> and improvements that enable their extension (which are also general
> goodness for Clang), but there must be *something*. We simply can't
> take a massive code dump on a promise.

Fair enough. I agree.

Thanks again,
Hal

> 
> 	- Doug
> 

-- 
Hal Finkel
Postdoctoral Appointee
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory