[LLVMdev] [PATCH v2] X86: disambiguate unqualified btr, bts

[David Chisnall]

On 17 Jul 2013, at 07:56, Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon at gmail.com> wrote:

> who mentioned Linus
> or the kernel community now?

You did:

>   I got Linus and hpa to
> comment on the issue,

Linus' comments were also confrontational and impolite, and he then proceeded to continue Linux-specific discussions that were completely off-topic for this list while keeping LLVMDev on the cc: list, wasting the time (and bandwidth) of all of the subscribers to this list who are not Linux developers.  

The Linux kernel community has been in the tech news in the last couple of days defending abusive behaviour on mailing lists.  This is something that we do not accept in the LLVM community, nor in any of the other open source communities that I am a member of.  For example:

> I don't give a shit about whether you think it is "absolutely wrong"
> or not

This is completely inappropriate for any public mailing list.  Apparently the LKML puts up with this kind of things, but most community driven projects do not.  

> Do you value contributors at all? (That's a rhetorical, because I
> already know the answer from the way you've been treating me: no)

Yes, contributors are valuable, however contributors are members of a community and are expected to behave in a way that reflects this.  There are a lot of people on this mailing list that I have argued with on technical matters, but none has ever felt the need to resort to profanity or personal attacks.  

> Do you care about getting LLVM to work with real-world codebases?
> (Again a rhetorical, because I already know the answer: no)

You mean like iOS, OS X, or FreeBSD, which all use Clang/LLVM as their system compiler?  Or perhaps the Android NDK, which ships Clang 3.1 in the latest release and has Clang 3.3 in trunk?  Or Debian, which now tests building all packages with Clang and has a repository where they can be downloaded?  

Yes, we're quite interested in getting LLVM to work with real-world codebases.  In many cases, we encounter a question of whether to support poor design choices in GCC that are used by a small number of packages, or impose something stricter, which benefits everyone in the long run in terms of code cleanups.  

You view Linux as a very important package.  This list has some Google people who might agree with you, but it also has a lot of Apple employees, and people like Joerg (who led the integration of Clang and NetBSD) and myself (a member of the FreeBSD Core Team), for whom it's just some third-party codebase with a reputation for relying on GCC-specific behaviour and containing code that relies on undefined behaviour and a vocal community that complains to GCC whenever they change their interpretation of undefined behaviour.  If we can support it, that's great.  If supporting it comes at a cost to other users of LLVM (either in terms of worse code, or less error reporting), then that's something that will need to be evaluated carefully on its merits, which is what the discussion that was already in progress was doing.

David