[llvm-dev] LLVM Discourse migration: goals justify means?

[Alex Bradbury via llvm-dev]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2022 at 22:36, Roman Lebedev <lebedev.ri at gmail.com> wrote:
> So the first point I would like to raise is:
> such painful, community-wide decisions **can not** be made in secret.
> One way or another, it's going to affect every single LLVM developer,
> be it one working on the upstream LLVM, or some downstream fork,
> or those just wishing to keep up with the project.
> **There should be transparency and accountability.**
>
> The second question I would like to raise is:
> the blog post claims transparent, first-class email support,
> but the mailing list mode can not actually be toggled on.
> There is just no such checkbox, unlike some other discourse forum.
> For me personally, that is a deal-breaker, and unless I'm able to
> keep up to date with the discussions in the lists format,
> I'm simply going to stop following discussions, period.

Hi Roman - thank you for flagging that mailing list mode was disabled.
I thought things had gone a little quiet!

Firstly, I wanted to explicitly recognise that maintaining or evolving
project infrastructure can be a thankless job (or even worse - it's
easy for it to feel like every action attracts criticism!). I'm
genuinely grateful to everyone who has put time into trying to improve
the way we communicate within LLVM. I was quite happy with mailing
lists, but Discourse with mailing list mode didn't seem to really
degrade my experience in any meaningful way. I'll drop a note on
<https://llvm.discourse.group/t/disabling-site-wide-mailing-list-mode-not-reply-by-email-or-watching-categories-via-email/6022>
about how important mailing list mode is to me.

One suggestion for future such decisions would be to more explicitly
follow something based around LLVM's contentious decision making
process <https://github.com/llvm/llvm-www/blob/main/proposals/LP0001-LLVMDecisionMaking.md>.

Best,

Alex