[llvm-dev] [RFC] One or many git repositories?

[Renato Golin via llvm-dev]

On 29 July 2016 at 15:26, Robinson, Paul via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> I believe David Chisnall up-thread cited a difference in checkout times
> on the order of a handful of seconds versus a couple of minutes.  While
> naively it might seem not a big deal, over time and depending on what you
> are trying to do yes it can be a big burden.

TL;DR: This thread is dead. Let's move on.

I think the biggest fallacy in this thread is that changing process is cheap.

It is certainly cheap for me to do "git foo" instead of "git bar" from
now on. It's moderately expensive to change my buildbot
configurations, Zorg's builders and re-test everything for public CI.
It's a lot more expensive to change how distributions build their
hundreds of thousands of packages over multiple LTS releases, or how
downstream users like Sony, Apple or ARM re-factor their entire build
systems (which very likely link to a lot of non-LLVM stuff), and then
some.

None of that is impossible, most of that is a "one off". Most of the
companies and big projects "could" afford to do that.

But there are two big points that people like me, Paul and David have
been unsuccessfully trying to make obvious:

1. Not every LLVM user is as big as FreeBSD, Sony or Apple. There are
a lot of very interesting projects (hobbyists, academia, professional)
using Clang, LLVM, libc++, etc. that don't have the staff to do that
move. Being a hobbyist myself, I know too well that, when a library
radically changes the way they behave (like boost did every new
release about 10 years ago), I will stop using it.

2. Changes in complex systems have unwanted larger consequences. Build
systems are some of the most complex systems in existence because
they're mostly irrational and patched together with duct tape and
paper clips. What may be very simple for some build systems, could be
impossible for others, and that's not the other's team's fault.

So, if you have a complex build system yourself, and you spent some
time and have figured out that it would be easy, you *cannot* assume
it should be easy for everyone with an less or equally complex build
systems.

If you find it simple to change your own workflow towards this or that
solution, you *cannot* assume everyone else should feel the same. This
also doesn't diminish their intelligence or competence. Intelligent
and competent people work in very different ways, and it's actually
because of that fact that we can do such complex software works in a
multitude of systems. If we were all equal, we wouldn't need to
discuss anything. :)

Mehdi said very early, and repeated many time, on some of the threads,
something to the effect of: "Saying how hard or easy it is for you is
an invalid argument, we need more concrete facts".

I absolutely agree with that statement, but interpreting how easy or
hard concrete facts would be fall on the same fallacy, so it doesn't
bring us closer to consensus, it brings us closer to dissent.

That is why I think this thread has already surpassed it's usefulness
(for a long time), and we need a concrete write up on the proposal. (I
hear it's in progress, let's wait for it).

>From now on, I'd propose the discussion to be *just* about this
specific proposal, preferably over a Phabricator review on the
document. People that have strong opinions about it should wait for
the survey.

Just to reiterate, the survey is to collect opinions in a formal and
non-passionate manner. It will not be a "majority vote", and we're not
locked between these two solutions as they're absolutely drawn out in
the documents, nor we are forced to take any decision if the community
is clearly split. The last think I want is to destroy part of the
community while trying to make it better.

But this long thread is not doing any good either.

cheers,
--renato