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

Thu Nov 7 00:08:56 PST 2019

Strong -1 personally.

* What is the endgoal? To fully kill phab and move to github pullrequests?
  it might be best to discuss *that* first. (did i miss an RFC?)
* Separation of attention - does everyone who cares
  now has to also look at pull requests for reviews;
  or should they be exempt from general review attention?
* For me personally after using phabricator, github now seems
  extremely crude, laggy, limited. To name a few:
  * There is no way to see previous version of the patch.
    I don't think there is any way to disable force-push for PR's.
    While this is only 'slightly' limiting for the reviewer,
    this can be more limiting for the author - how do i go back
    to previous revision? I can't, i need to maintain a copy
    of every branch i pushed manually.
  * Impossible to chain reviews - a PR diff can only be made
    on top of git master branch. Any non-trivial change consists of
    separable PR's. Now either one will only be able to submit
    dependent PR after the prereqs are merged, or the diff will be
    impossible to read.
  * Does not load large diffs by default.
    That caught me by surprise several times
    when i was searching for something.
  * No diffs in mail - *super* inconvenient.
    One has to open each pr in browser (or fetch via git etc etc)
  * Github is an official US-based commercial organisation.
    It *has* to follow U.S. export law. In particular i'm thinking of
      https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-countries/
      https://github.com/tkashkin/GameHub/issues/289
    Does phabricator already have such restrictions, blocks?
    If not, wouldn't you say adding such restrictions is not being
    more open for contributors?
    What happens when, in not so long in the future, the entirety of, say,
    china or russian federation is blocked as such?
  * Same question can be asked about internet "iron" curtains
    certain (*cough*) countries are raising. That also has already happened
    before (and *will* happen again), and i was personally affected:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#Russia
    I don't recall that happening to phabricator yet.
    I fail to see how that is more contributor-friendly.
  * Not sure anyone cares, but while using github as main git
    repository "mirror" is perfectly fine - git is distributed, only canonical
    write-repo would be affected anything bad happen. But that isn't the case
    for reviews, issues; as it has been discussed in the "let's migrate bugzilla
    to github issues", it is far more involved.
  * What about DMCA? Not sure how this is currently handled.
  * UI feels laggy. Not much to add here, pretty subjective.
  * I'm sure i'm missing a few.

The github does come with it's benefits, sure:
* It is *simpler* to preserve git commit author.
  Currently one has to ask the author for the "Author: e at ma.il" line,
  and do `git commit --amend --author="<>"`.
* @mention is wide-r-reaching - whole github, not just llvm phabricator
* No more "phabricator disk full" issues
* ???

TLDR: such migration lowers the bar for new, first time,
unestabilished contributors, but i personally feel it *significantly*
raises the bar for the existing contributors, reviewers.
We don't live in perfect world. Aspirational goals are aspirational.
They should be attempted to be reached, but they shouldn't shadow and
overweight, take over the main goal of the LLVM project.

Personally, i don't see that benefits out-/over- weight the drawbacks.

Roman.

On Thu, Nov 7, 2019 at 8:32 AM Mehdi AMINI via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> Here is a more complete doc on the topic: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DSHQrfydSjoqU9zEnj3rIcds6YN59Jxc37MdiggOyaI
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Mehdi
>
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