[llvm-dev] Mailing List Status Update

[Philip Reames via llvm-dev]

I have concerns about this proposal.  Those concerns aren't necessarily 
unaddressable, but I do want to share them.  My concerns fall into two 
broad categories.

The first category is the process one.  My understanding when the LLVM 
foundation was established was that the role of the foundation and the 
board was to support the community, not to make major decisions for the 
community.  I understand there is a degree of pragmatism we have to 
accept - e.g. sometimes the situation forces our hand, and we need to 
act, even if in a sub-optimal way - but this runs dangerously close to 
the edge of the board dictating the solution to the community.  I do 
want to acknowledge that I truly do thing everyone on the board is 
acting in good faith here.  I'm not so much worried about the intentions 
of anyone involved so much as the appearance and precedent this sets.

The second category is the proposed migration itself.  I'll start by 
saying that the restriction in the proposal text to the *-dev lists 
(explicitly excluding the *commits lists) does soften my concerns 
substantially, but I'm left wondering about the long term plan for the 
commit lists.  As has come up in recent threads around phabricator, I 
feel the commit lists play a critical role in our development practice 
and, almost more importantly, *culture* which is hard to replicate.   
I'm a bit worried that this proposal if accepted will be the camel 
getting his nose under the tent as it were.

Specific to the dev lists, I'm very hesitant about moving from mailing 
lists to discourse.  Why?

Well, the first and most basic is I'm worried about having core 
infrastructure out of our own control.  For all their problems, mailing 
lists are widely supported, there are many vendors/contractors 
available.  For discourse, as far as I can tell, there's one vendor.  
It's very much a take it or leave it situation.  The ability to preserve 
discussion archives through a transition away from discourse someday 
concerns me.  I regularly and routinely need to dig back through 
llvm-dev threads which are years old.  I've also recently had some 
severely negative customer experiences with other tools (most recently 
discord), and the thought of having my employability and ability to 
contribute to open source tied to my ability to get a response from 
customer service teams at some third party vendor I have no leverage 
with, bluntly, scares me.

Second, I feel that we've overstated the difficulty of maintaining 
mailing lists.  I have to acknowledge that I have little first hand 
experience administering mailman, so maybe I'm way off here.  However, 
there are multiple commercial vendors which provide mailman hosting.  
TBH, this seems like a case where the foundation should simply pay for 
commercial hosting and migration support to mailman3.  It may be this is 
a lot more expensive in practice than I'm imagining, but this feels like 
it should be our default answer and that anything else (i.e. discourse) 
should require major evidence of benefit over that default to be considered.

Third, I'm worried that there are culture elements very tied up in our 
current usage of the mailing lists.  As some specific examples, consider 
each of the following:

  * Discourse does not allow private responses via email.  You have to
    use their web interface.  I spent a lot of time replying privately
    to other contributors.  I'm worried that, in practice, the extra
    step will cause me to follow up less, and miss even more responses. 
    I'm particularly concerned about the impact for new contributors. 
    (Existing contributors, I probably have an email address for already.)
  * Discourses does not allow cross posts (or at least, it's not clear
    how to do so).  At least a couple times a year, we have design
    discussions which cross between sub-projects.  This can be addressed
    with a process change, but it needs some discussion before the
    migration happens.

It's not that we can't adjust our processes to the limitations of 
discourse; we clearly can.  My concern is all of the subtle things we 
loose along the way.

Now that I've finished up, let me explicitly state that I don't intend 
my comments here to be blocking.  I don't think this is a good idea, or 
at least needs further expansion before acceptance, but I'm also not in 
place where I can really invest in providing a realistic alternative.  
At the end of the day, pragmatism does require that we give discretion 
to the folks actually investing their own time, and energy to keep the 
community running.

Philip



On 6/1/21 1:50 PM, Tom Stellard via llvm-dev wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We recently[1] ran into some issues with the mailing lists that caused
> us to disable automatic approval of subscriptions.  Over the past few
> months, the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors have been investigating
> solutions to this issue and are recommending that the project move its
> discussion forum from mailman to Discourse[2].
>
> The proposed migration plan is to move the discussion lists (e.g *-dev,
> *-users lists) to Discourse as soon as possible.  The commit email lists
> (*-commits lists) will remain on mailman until a not-yet-determined date
> in the future, after which they will be replaced by something else.
> Some commit lists alternatives include Discourse and GitHub commit
> comments (but there may be others).
>
> Here are the reasons why the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors is
> recommending this change:
>
> - The LLVM project discussion lists cannot be adequately maintained by 
> our
>   current volunteer infrastructure staff and without changes we run the
>   risk of a major outage.
>
> - We are able to make this change without significant impact to user's or
>   developer's daily workflows because Discourse supports email 
> subscriptions
>   and posting (NOTE: if you are concerned that your workflow may be 
> impacted
>   by this change, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group[3], so
>   they can help test your workflow with Discourse.)
>
> - Discourse gives us additional features that will benefit the community:
>   - Easy to signup and subscribe to categories
>   - Better moderation tools.
>   - Web-based user interface.
>   - Ability to send announcements to multiple categories to avoid 
> having to
>     cross-post community wide announcements.
>
> - A subset of the community (MLIR) have been experimenting with Discourse
>   for over a year and are able to provide feedback about this experience
>   to the Board of Directors.
>
> We did also consider one alternative, which was migrating our lists to a
> mailman hosting service.  However, we concluded that with all the work it
> would take to migrate our lists to another service, it would be better
> if we moved to a service (like Discourse) that provided more features
> than what we have now.
>
> We understand that moving to Discourse is a change for the community and
> that people may be worried about this having a negative impact on their
> participation in the project.  As mentioned above, we believe that this
> change can be done without significant impact to anyone’s workflows.
> If you disagree, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group, to
> document the impact to your workflow, so we can work together to find
> a solution for your issue.
>
> If you have any other questions or comments you can raise them on this
> thread and please keep criticisms constructive and on topic.
>
>
> LLVM Foundation Board of Directors
>
> [1] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2021-March/149027.html
> [2] https://www.discourse.org/
> [3] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg
>
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
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