[llvm-dev] LLVM Infrastructure Changes - Moving to Discourse

[James Henderson via llvm-dev]

Hi,

I personally don't really have any particular opinion on moving to
Discourse, versus staying on mailing lists (if pushed, my naturally
conservative mindset would say stay/use mailman 3 as discussed before, but
I'd probably adapt to a switch quickly enough). However, I do have some
related concerns to do with the process in particular:

1) Regarding this paragraph in the blog:

"The majority of the community was in favor of the move when the move to
Discourse was discussed extensively on the LLVM mailing lists. This
provides the features mentioned above in addition to a more modern
communication. We did hear of one feature some would miss compared to
Mailman: the ability to reply to someone directly through email. However,
while it may not be ideal for some, we feel this is a worthwhile tradeoff
to gain the other benefits, e.g. better safety for LLVM developers and
users in general."

I skimmed the most recent thread on this topic from the middle of last
year, and the distinct impression I got was that the majority opinion, or
at least about half of those posting were actually against any move to
Discourse, with several raised concerns that I never saw addressed (topics
about accessibility and disagreements from existing moderators to the point
about moderation being a problem on mailman being two examples). I haven't
gone over the thread which originally introduced Discourse back in 2019, so
I can't say what happened there. Was this majority reached in the 2019
thread, because my memory of it was that there was no clear consensus in
either direction?

2) Also from the above paragraph: who is "we" in "we feel this is a
worthwhile tradeoff"? If referring to a specific subgroup (e.g. the IWG/the
board), were these concerns actually discussed with the people who raised
the concerns? If not, this seems to me like a case of "others don't agree
with us, but we're going to ignore their concerns and go ahead with what we
(i.e. the IWG/the board etc) want to do" which isn't how community
consensus works...

3) The category structure: "January 7-9 - Re-configure the existing LLVM
Discourse to the new category/subcategory structure (see below)"
When was this structure discussed? Note that the mailing list announcement
came AFTER this point of time had started, meaning there was zero
opportunity for people like myself who have concerns with the category
breakdown to raise them and suggest improvements. Contrast this with the
Github Issues migration, where I was able to get additional categories
added to the list of labels, to reflect the pre-existing bugzilla
breakdown, and how I used this.

Three particular categories of topics that aren't reflected in the
breakdown are a) debug information, b) LLVM tools like llvm-readelf,
llvm-objdump, yaml2obj etc, c) testing infrastructure, i.e. lit, FileCheck
etc.

4) The timeline: "January 10-20 (sometime during these 2 weeks) - The LLVM
mailing list archives are migrated to Discourse and it is sanity checked by
volunteers of the LLVM community. This sanity check can take a week or
more." and "We encourage all LLVM community members to start using
Discourse on Jan 10th to minimize any disruption once the mailing lists
become read only and the final messages are merged to Discourse"

Given that this timeline starts today, and was only announced over the
weekend (my time), there is zero opportunity for anybody to raise concerns
or points, made worse by the fact that many community members might be off
for a couple of weeks without any idea this is going on. This timeline
should have been at a minimum 2-3 weeks after announcing it before it even
begins. Again, contrast this with the recent bugzilla migration, where
there were plenty of opportunities for others to raise feedback, and time
to address them, before the migration even started. The 1st of February is
the earliest any of this should have been starting, in my opinion, not the
final cut-off!

James

On Sat, 8 Jan 2022 at 07:19, Tanya Lattner via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> LLVM Community,
>
> I just posted a blog post about the upcoming changes to the mailing lists
> and LLVM Discourse forums:
> https://blog.llvm.org/posts/2022-01-07-moving-to-discourse/
>
> I am sure some may be anxious about this change, but I hope we can work
> together as a community to resolve any potential issues or help each other
> navigate this change. I have put the migration to discourse guide that was
> drafted by the Infrastructure Working Group in LLVM Docs, and encourage
> people to add their tips and tricks to help others migrate over.
> https://llvm.org/docs/DiscourseMigrationGuide.html
>
> If you have any questions about the plan, please let me know.
>
> Thanks,
> Tanya
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>
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