[llvm-dev] LLVM Releases: Upstream vs. Downstream / Distros

[Renato Golin via llvm-dev]

On 12 May 2016 at 21:06, Daniel Berlin <dberlin at dberlin.org> wrote:
> For all of them? Unequivocally: no.
> You can define a subset of external customers you care about, and want to
> work with you, and do something for them.

That's what I did. :)

I copied all people that have expressed concerns about our release or
back-porting process in some way on this email.

I'm glad Stephen, Bero, Paul Kristof, Antoine and David replied, as
well as you and Hans, so that we could have a better picture of who's
interested in participating more on the release process, and also how
much does our process really hurts them.

Seems I was wrong about many things, but not all of it. For me, being
proven that I *don't* have a problem is a big win, so thanks everyone!
:)


> Maybe.  In any case, LLVM (as a community) has to  define who the customers
> are that it wants to prioritize, and know what they care about, before you
> can start solving their problems. :)

I'm advocating for them to help us solve their own problems. Which
nicely solves the "who do we care more" problem. :)


> We already do this a little bit in the community, telling people they need
> to update tests for what their patches break, etc.

Yup. And I'm glad folks have now explicitly said they could help the
releases with some extra testing (building packages with the
pre-release). That, for me, is already a major win.

If that leads into them helping more later, or us being more
pro-active with their requests that we have been in some cases
(specifically the abi_tag case), that's a bonus (and slightly
selfish).


> This is not unlike that, just at a larger scale. So, for example, saying who
> bears the cost of API compatibility, and to what degree.

The API is slightly harder to solve that way. Most people that use our
APIs are not big companies or projects, and we want to be nice to
them, too, even if they can't help as much as Google.

Same for some distros, that the packagers are responsible for *a lot*
of packages, and they can't spend all month on a single one.

I don't have a solution to that, and this email was a request to solve
that problem (as well as the distros). I also don't know how to reach
them in any different way than this email.

If anyone has better ideas, please feel free to do what you can.

cheers,
--renato