[llvm-dev] Enable Contributions Through Pull-request For LLVM

[Mehdi AMINI via llvm-dev]

Hi all,

Now that we're on GitHub, we can discuss about pull-requests.
I'd like to propose to enable pull-request on GitHub, as a first step as an
experimental channel alongside the existing methods for contributing to
LLVM.
This would allow to find workflow issues and address them, and also LLVM
contributors in general to start getting familiar with pull-requests
without committing to switching to pull-requests immediately. The community
should evaluate after a few months what would the next steps be.

GitHub pull-requests is the natural way to contribute to project hosted on
GitHub: this feature is so core to GitHub that there is no option to
disable it!

The current proposal is to allow to integrate contributions to the LLVM
project directly from pull-requests. In particular the exact setup would be
the following:

  - Contributors should use their own fork and push a branch in their fork.
  - Reviews can be performed on GitHub. The canonical tools are still the
mailing-list and Phabricator: a reviewer can request the review to move to
Phabricator.
  - The only option available will be to “squash and merge”. This mode of
review matches the closest our current workflow (both phabricator and
mailing-list): conceptually independent contributions belongs to separate
review threads, and thus separate pull-requests.
This also allow the round of reviews to not force-push the original branch
and accumulate commits: this keeps the contextual history of comments and
allow to visualize the incremental diff across revision of the
pull-request.
  - Upon “merge” of a pull-request: *history is linear* and a single commit
lands in master after review is completed.

As an alternative staging proposal: we could enable pull-requests only for
a small subset of sub-projects in LLVM (i.e. not LLVM/clang to begin with
for example) in the repo. In this case, we would propose to begin with the
MLIR project (as soon as it gets integrated in the monorepo). This would be
a good candidate to be the guinea pig for this process since it does not
yet have a wide established community of contributors, and the current
contributors are already exclusively using pull-requests
<https://github.com/tensorflow/mlir/pulls>.

Here is a more complete doc on the topic:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DSHQrfydSjoqU9zEnj3rIcds6YN59Jxc37MdiggOyaI

Cheers,

-- 
Mehdi
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