[llvm-dev] RFC: Moving toward Discord and Discourse for LLVM's discussions

Mon Nov 18 07:58:17 PST 2019

Hi Christopher,

Yes, email takes longer to put together.  I find this a good thing.  It forces me to think harder about what I’m saying, and even in the course of re-drafting this message I have changed my mind several times.  There’s no value to putting you through my internal debates.  Anything that encourages more thoughtfulness of posts is a good thing.

“Editing of sent messages” sounds like a path to Orwellian revisionism and not a healthy thing.  (The last time I did it was when my Slack client unexpectedly seized focus and posted part of my password.)  Why is this better than thinking more carefully about what to say in the first place?  In a chat-like forum the give-and-take lets me fix things without rewriting history.  In email I’m more careful but I can still correct myself as needed.

I also don’t like communicating with selected sub-groups because it fragments communication and history.  A number of times, people have contacted me privately, and in many cases it isn’t genuinely private so I redirect the conversation to the lists.  I *want* to see what’s going on all over the project, because I have no idea what might be relevant to my work.  As it happens I am a long-time member of what we jokingly refer to as the “debug-info cabal” but we don’t have private discussions that exclude everyone else.  That’s bad for the health of the community.
This is different from having a web forum with sub-forums identified by broad topic, which are still open to everyone; that’s a reasonable way to organize things.

Regarding people judging what you say… In a technical forum, the work product should be what matters, and I’ve found addressing comments to the work product rather than the person makes a huge difference.  (FTR it took me two tries to rewrite this post that way. I hope the result is essentially non-judgmental.)
--paulr

From: Christopher Degawa <ccom at randomderp.com>
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2019 9:12 AM
To: Robinson, Paul <paul.robinson at sony.com>
Cc: Chandler Carruth <chandlerc at gmail.com>; llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] RFC: Moving toward Discord and Discourse for LLVM's discussions

|  mailing lists for longer-form discussions are unfamiliar, difficult, and often intimidating for newcomers

Um… what?  While I know (via my own children) that folks nowadays use multiple avenues of communication, it’s *really* hard to imagine email as a *mechanism* being unfamiliar/difficult/intimidating.  Moving to a new mechanism wouldn’t alter the fact of the very large number of strangers participating, which to my mind would be the unfamiliar/difficult/intimidating part.
--paulr

In my (18) personal opinion, I feel that email is a somewhat difficult mechanism of communicating, simply because email requires a different and often complex style of formulating an email and etiquette compared to the instant messaging style of being able to send a few worded messages due to the low cost of sending messages and editing messages. The person writing an email would have to make sure that whatever they send is correct the first time since there is no editing of send messages and the only way to keep a history through email is by either the subject or what is quoted.

A few benefit of using Discord or other new mechanisms that I prefer to have over just emailing list are code formatting, being able to group people together (devs of x, list moderators, etc), and the ability to casually talk about stuff other than just meta or code related issues. Being able to communicate with other developers casually helps reinforce that the other devs are also human and not just a bunch of coders behind a computer screen that might judge you for every word you might say.

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 8:49 AM Robinson, Paul via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:
|  mailing lists for longer-form discussions are unfamiliar, difficult, and often intimidating for newcomers

Um… what?  While I know (via my own children) that folks nowadays use multiple avenues of communication, it’s *really* hard to imagine email as a *mechanism* being unfamiliar/difficult/intimidating.  Moving to a new mechanism wouldn’t alter the fact of the very large number of strangers participating, which to my mind would be the unfamiliar/difficult/intimidating part.
--paulr

From: llvm-dev <llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org>> On Behalf Of Chandler Carruth via llvm-dev
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2019 2:48 AM
To: llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>>
Subject: [llvm-dev] RFC: Moving toward Discord and Discourse for LLVM's discussions

Hello everyone,

Short version:
I've set up an LLVM Discord server for real time chat (similar to IRC) and an LLVM Discourse server for forums (similar to email lists):
https://discord.gg/xS7Z362
https://llvm.discourse.group/

Please join and use these new services. They are only partially set up and still very new, so don't hesitate to improve them and/or reach out to this thread with any issues you see or things you want to fix. Also, both services have dedicated feedback channels.

Do feel free to use Discourse for technical discussions, although try not to create duplicate discussions (any more than you would between the lists and Bugzilla) and make sure the people you're having the discussion with are fine using Discourse instead of the email list. In case Discourse doesn't work out, we'll collect and archive everything so it isn't lost.

Longer version & more details:
During this year's Women in Compilers and Tools meeting, folks expressed very clearly that our communication systems cause a non-trivial amount of friction for new people trying to find out about, learn, or contribute to LLVM. Both IRC for chatting and mailing lists for longer-form discussions are unfamiliar, difficult, and often intimidating for newcomers. While I have long been a fan and resistant to change in these areas, the feedback from folks at WiCT was compelling and important for us as a community to address. Even if it means I have to let go of my precious IRC. ;]

We talked to a bunch of people and looked at the options out there and the most promising ones were Discord for chatting and Discourse for longer-form discussions. Meike and I have set up both an initial Discord and Discourse server. You can find them here:
https://discord.gg/xS7Z362
https://llvm.discourse.group/

There is still a lot of work to be done. Notably, it'd be great for folks to clean up and improve the summaries for each of the groups in Discourse, and I'll be asking various people to help moderate on both Discourse and Discord. If you'd like to help out with a specific set of improvements to these, don't hesitate to reach out to me or Meike and we can get you set up. Some specific things we're already working on:

  *   Getting Discord verified with a nice URL.
  *   Archives of mailing lists on Discourse so you can search in one place, etc.

     *   See the plan here: https://llvm.discourse.group/t/mirroring-and-archiving-llvm-mailing-lists-on-discourse/61

  *   Moving Discourse to forums.llvm.org<http://forums.llvm.org>.
  *   Documenting the best way to move to Discourse while preserving a similarly email-focused workflow.

We're just adding these for now, but I'd like people to seriously try using them. While IRC has served us fairly well, I think it is one of the bigger barriers to entry. Our email lists are more effective, but also have had serious infrastructure challenges over the years: a constant flow of spam, bouncing for several major email providers, etc. Discourse has very powerful email-based workflows available and I think we should seriously consider moving to Discourse long-term instead of the email lists.

I also want to say thanks to all the folks at the WiCT workshop for giving me and others feedback. I was pretty set in my ways around these kind of things, but hearing the kinds of challenges this has posed to people less established in the community was a real eye opener. It takes a lot to speak up like this, and I really appreciate it. I hope this also helps start to address these long-standing issues. Also a huge thanks to Tanya for organizing the WICT workshop and Meike for helping drive this message home to me and doing a bunch of the work getting these things set up. I wouldn't have been able to do it without her help, especially around Discord bots.

-Chandler
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