[llvm-dev] LLVM Incubator + new projects draft

[Nicolai Hähnle via llvm-dev]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2020 at 11:12 PM Chris Lattner via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> > I'm not sure I agree with the no-code standard.  I agree with minimal code, but I think an incubator should be established enough to be discussed concretely (e.g. "what is" vs "ideals").
>
> I hear what you’re saying, but I think we can handle this as part of the approval process.  We can bounce of things that qualitatively don’t feel credible and give guidance there, but can still be receptive if something seems like a promising direction.

I have to say that I agree with Philip here, and saying "we can handle
this as part of the process" feels like a cop-out to me. Part of the
point of writing up a document like this is to establish and document
expectations, and this is an important expectation to establish.

To clarify, the key underlying issue here is that there is no reason
to make incubation a free-for-all (people can always create repos on
GitHub), but if it's not a free-for-all, then a decision must be made
somehow. The question is: what grounds is that decision going to be
made on?

The fewer concrete artefacts we have to make a decision, the more
people will form their opinions based on soft, clique-ish factors such
as whether they like the person making the proposal, whether they
consider them to "already be part of the community", what company or
university they work for (if any), and so on. Clique-ishness is the
opposite of inclusivity, so I feel very strongly that the expectation
should be having at least _some_ basic artefacts here. There might be
the rare legitimate exception to this rule, but that is nicely
captured by making it a "Should" rule.

Along similar lines, having some sort of manifesto / development plan
/ whatever really should be a Must. Writing something like that up is
an incredibly low bar, and if people can't even be bothered to do
*that*, well... Having that Must next to "there Should be a prototype"
also helps clarify the expectations.


> > As I mentioned before, I'd advocate for the notion of a sponsor (an existing LLVM contributor) for each incubator.  I'd have that a must on the incubator list.
>
> Yes, this is a good idea.  The problem here is “how do we decide who qualifies as a sponsor?”.  I don’t know a good way to say that - someone with N years of LLVM experience, M patches, …?  How does this get explained?

Do we really need that? It feels to me like this is much more
something that could be handled as part of the approval process. If
nobody from "the community" (whatever that means) is in favor of the
incubation, then it's not going to happen. So kind of by definition
you need at least one person speaking in favor :)

Cheers,
Nicolai

-- 
Lerne, wie die Welt wirklich ist,
aber vergiss niemals, wie sie sein sollte.