[PATCH] D121078: Replace links to archived mailing lists by links to Discourse forums

Tue Mar 8 04:31:15 PST 2022

aaron.ballman added a comment.

In D121078#3366025 <https://reviews.llvm.org/D121078#3366025>, @tonic wrote:

> In D121078#3365542 <https://reviews.llvm.org/D121078#3365542>, @SimplyDanny wrote:
>
>> In D121078#3363856 <https://reviews.llvm.org/D121078#3363856>, @aaron.ballman wrote:
>>
>>> I think we need to retain *some* references to the existing mailing list archives. The migration to Discourse worked fairly well, but there were still data migration issues.  For example:
>>
>> Do you have some prominent places in mind where the archives should be mentioned? For me as someone who just started to get a bit more involved into LLVM, the archives are not very helpful. There is no way to search for threads as far as I know. That means it is very hard to find anything specific. That is why I actually came up with this change in the first place: Getting rid of references to the "old' mailing lists which are just not helpful for beginners.

Oh, I think these changes are *fantastic*, so I'm happy we're updating the stale references to point to the more modern place to go. Thank you for that!

There are ways to search the archives (as Tanya mentioned, you can use a google site search over them), but you have to know they exist to know to do that, which is why I'd like to retain some mention of them until the migration moves over *all* of the historical data. It's not super handy for most folks, so I don't think we need a *prominent* place for this. But it is handy for those of us who have to do a fair amount of historical digging around to see how we came to the conclusions we came to (not a common activity, but it is not uncommon for folks on standards committees to be asked "why does your implementation do X?" and need to go looking).

I think the least distracting thing we could do would be to put a superscript footnote after any link to a particular discourse forum which goes to an anchor at the bottom of the page to a footnote saying something like what I recommended below. This should keep the focus for most people on going to Discourse, it shouldn't be overly distracting or confusing to people new to the docs, but it still retains useful information that some folks need.

> You do not need to worry about this.

In your opinion, that may be true; in mine, this is still a concern.

> Your change is updating the locations people are to ask for help.

The change is also touching `Mailing List & Forums` content, which are not specifically about asking for help (they can also be for reading instead of writing).

> That has changed to Discourse and this is the proper change. This is separate from the archive situation which we are actively working on and I have full confidence will be sorted out. In addition, most people are not looking for archives here, they will do a google search or search the archives (which is effectively a google search since we have limited search on our website).

The migration *lost data* and I think it's important we retain some links for those of us who do code archeology a fair amount. Old timers will certainly remember that we used to have mailing lists, but that number is going to decrease as old timers leave the community and newcomers arrive. I see value in telling people who are new to the community where they can find the full, accurate history of conversations and so I still see the need to retain *some* link for quite some time. It's trivial to retain these links with some wording like `The canonical historical information from this mailing list can be found at <link>.` And if we don't expect to retain that archive forever because we have full confidence we'll get all the data migrated eventually, we can add an additional sentence along the lines of `This archive is expected to be removed once the migration to Discourse has been verified to not lose data.` or something.

>> In D121078#3363856 <https://reviews.llvm.org/D121078#3363856>, @aaron.ballman wrote:
>>
>>> Also, the commits mailing lists are still hosted by mailman and remain relevant to the community for the foreseeable future.
>>
>> I tried to keep them in all places and just replaced the "-dev" lists by references to the forum(s). Have you found a link to a commits mailing list which I removed unintentionally?
>
> Do not worry about this as you have kept all the references to commits list.

Thanks, you're absolutely right about that -- I missed that we retained the existing links to the commits lists. Sorry for the noise there.

Repository:
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CHANGES SINCE LAST ACTION
  https://reviews.llvm.org/D121078/new/

https://reviews.llvm.org/D121078