[llvm-dev] [RFC] AAP Backend

[Philip Reames via llvm-dev]

On 08/26/2016 09:45 AM, Mehdi Amini via llvm-dev wrote:
>> On Aug 26, 2016, at 9:09 AM, Renato Golin <renato.golin at linaro.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 26 August 2016 at 16:58, Mehdi Amini <mehdi.amini at apple.com> wrote:
>>> This was addressed in Alex’s email: " In the past, the only exception I can think of is the Lanai backend, but in that case we have a strong commitment of multiple employees at a major corporation committed to that target's maintenance.”.
>> So, are we picking features based on company size, now? That doesn't
>> make much sense in an open source project…
> “Major corporation” does not mean size to me, I read it as “having a major involvement in the project”.
The position Mehdi is expressing him is entirely reasonable and one that 
I explicitly support.  Asking for evidence of likely future contribution 
before accepting a large piece of code is entirely reasonable and in 
line with our previous practice.
>
>
>> The current policy states:
>>
>> "There must be an active community behind the target. This community
>> will help maintain the target by providing buildbots, fixing bugs,
>> answering the LLVM community’s questions and making sure the new
>> target doesn’t break any of the other targets, or generic code. This
>> behavior is expected to continue throughout the lifetime of the
>> target’s code."
>>
>> No mention about the size or the amount of money their companies have,
>> nor demands it to be a company at all.
>
> Note that the text mentions "active community”, which is what I’m asking about:
>
> “the question is about who will use/develop/maintain this backend upstream in LLVM?"
> "is there already an open-source community around this backend somewhere?"
>
>
> —
> Mehdi
>
>>
>>> I don’t think the 3 months cool down period replaces in any way this pre-evaluation.
>>> If a single developer / single user of a virtual architecture is active enough for 3 months that nothing really breaks, it does not make it an “active community”.
>> Er... This is what the current policy states:
>>
>> "The target must have addressed every other minimum requirement and
>> have been stable in tree for at least 3 months. This cool down period
>> is to make sure that the back-end and the target community can endure
>> continuous upstream development for the foreseeable future."
>>
>> If everyone else's code don't break their stuff, or if every breakage
>> is met with prompt fix and improvement on the test suite, it doesn't
>> matter how many people, who or how many they are.
>>
>> If nothing really breaks after 3 months it means that their back-end
>> is really pretty well isolated and hardened to cope with most
>> front-end and middle end changes that will be thrown at them at
>> considerable volumes. That sounds pretty good to me.
>>
>> cheers,
>> --renato
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