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

Tue Jan 11 00:47:42 PST 2022

Thanks Tanya. I've created an issue (
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/53122) for suggesting the three
new topics.

Regards,

James

On Mon, 10 Jan 2022 at 18:33, Tanya Lattner <tanyalattner at llvm.org> wrote:

> Answers below.
>
> On Jan 10, 2022, at 1:47 AM, James Henderson <jh7370.2008 at my.bristol.ac.uk>
> wrote:
>
> 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?
>
>
> There have been many discussions regarding Discourse over the last 2+
> years. Some of these occurred on the mailing list, some in round tables or
> workshops, in the IWG, and some 1-1 with individuals. It was from all of
> these data points that it was concluded the majority was in favor.
>
>
> 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...
>
>
> We -> LLVM Foundation
>
> Individuals can be reached via private message on Discourse so the ability
> to reach someone privately and directly still exists. However,you won’t be
> able to get that person’s direct email address.  There are tradeoffs in any
> decision and while we try really hard to make sure everyone is happy,
> unfortunately some may not be. I don’t think that means the concern was
> ignored, but it was determined not to be a blocker.
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> The categories were discussed in the IWG. The nice thing about Discourse
> is that things are not set in stone and we can move messages around and
> create/delete/reorganize categories as needed. If you would like to suggest
> a new category, please file a GitHub issue in the llvm-project.
>
>
> 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!
>
>
> It is just a suggestion. You can choose to wait until Feb 1st to use
> Discourse if you wish (which is 3 weeks away). There might be some downtime
> for threads that have not been merged over yet.
>
> Thanks,
> Tanya
>
>
> 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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