[cfe-dev] [llvm-dev] Phabricator -> GitHub PRs?

[John Marshall via cfe-dev]

On 8 Jan 2020, Jonas Devlieghere wrote:
> I believe that technically sending patches to the mailing list is
> still a valid way to get your code reviewed. Not everyone monitors the
> mailing list actively though so that might turn out to be more
> frustrating than Phabricator.

I can confirm that this is indeed frustrating.

I am only a user of Clang (and a former very minor contributor to GCC) but I was recently sufficiently piqued by a small Clang diagnostic infelicity that I looked into fixing it, and came up with what appears to this neophyte to be a trivial 2-line fix. As a first-time contributor to Clang, I read the instructions for contributing at <http://clang.llvm.org/get_involved.html>:

	"Clang is a subproject of the LLVM Project, but has its own mailing lists because the communities have people with different interests. The two clang lists are:
	• cfe-commits - This list is for patch submission/discussion.
	[snip]"

And at <https://llvm.org/docs/GettingStarted.html#sending-patches> (via <http://clang.llvm.org/hacking.html#patches>: "To contribute changes to Clang see LLVM's Getting Started page"):

	"We don’t currently accept github pull requests, so you’ll need to send patches either via emailing to llvm-commits, or, preferably, via Phabricator."

Having a trivial one-off patch to propose, and presented with a choice of creating a Phabricator account at llvm and learning how to use it or simply sending the patch via email -- obviously I chose the latter [1]. It's only been 10 days but there have been no replies and around 2000 other emails on the list since then. Of those ~2000, I noticed three that were not automatically generated -- one of which was a reply to another newbie, so well done Jonas Toth! [2]

Apart from that one instance of a reply, it would appear that 99+% of the messages on cfe-commits these days are automatically generated and hence that approximately zero people are actively monitoring the mailing list. So it would probably be good to update the contributing instructions to reflect reality.

    John


[1] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-commits/Week-of-Mon-20200120/302838.html
[2] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-commits/Week-of-Mon-20200127/304742.html