[llvm-dev] Email list just for front end developers?

[Sanjoy Das via llvm-dev]

Hi,

On Sat, May 6, 2017 at 11:31 AM, Perry E. Metzger via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> It makes sense to have a place for us to talk to each other where
> we're the dominant traffic, where our questions for each other aren't
> concealed amidst a very large amount of traffic on Clang's internals
> (or the rest of LLVM's), and where and our questions unrelated to local
> concerns are not viewed as an annoyance.

Why not just filter traffic on llvm-dev with "emails that haven't been
replied to within a week"?  Right now llvm-dev is, say, ~220 emails a
week, so after that filter you should a small enough set of threads
left which you can manually inspect.

I don't think people will be annoyed by frontend specific questions on
llvm-dev unless there is a very high number of them (unlikely), at
which point we can //maybe// consider splitting out a new mailing list
(but see below).

> I would just like a place that makes self help among other people in
> my position and that of the gentleman whose query I link to above more
> likely to succeed.

I agree that we do not do the best possible job in answering beginner
questions, but is there something preventing you from changing that
trend on llvm-dev, and making llvm-dev be that place where beginner
questions are reliably answered?

>> and I personally doubt you'd get as much expertise interested in
>> order to keep it viable.
>
> Then it will fail. That's a risk with any new mailing list. Luckily,
> the cost of mailing lists is very low, so the only risk is that the
> list gets no traffic. If that happens, well, so be it.

There are other risks too - fragmentation (I have to sign up for yet
another mailing list), discoverability (at this point many people
already know about llvm-dev, how do they find out about the
llvm-frontend-dev?).

-- Sanjoy