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

[Tom Stellard via llvm-dev]

On 1/27/22 06:03, Aaron Ballman via llvm-dev wrote:
> I also found this decision to be really surprising and disappointing.
> 
> I was surprised to hear a decision had been made at all, because the
> last public discussion about the switch was over six months ago, there
> was no clear consensus that I could see, and there were several
> unanswered questions and concerns raised on that thread. To me, this
> says that consensus was either not formed or was formed via a process
> that is completely opaque to me as a code owner and active
> contributor. It also gives me the impression that asking questions or
> providing feedback during an infrastructure RFC is largely a waste of
> time. Frankly, I find our RFC process to be untenable when it comes to
> decisions that impact the whole community; we have no idea what
> consensus looks like so the end result is continually "do it and the
> community will adapt or the people who disagree will leave."
> 
> I was also surprised to get an email after 2am on a Friday night (East
> Coast, US) telling me that the switch was happening and I should sign
> up to Discourse within two days or risk disruption. Coupled with the
> lack of communication that any decision was even being considered, I
> thought this could have been handled better with a more reasonable
> timeline.
> 
> Unfortunately, I don't see a good path forward from here. We now have
> Discourse, people are using it and folks who are happy about it will
> very reasonably wish to continue to do so, and anyway, we have no good
> (trivial) way to migrate back to a mailing list without losing the
> information now contained only on Discourse. We now also have people
> who are not able to use Discourse for whatever variety of reasons. So
> we've fractured our communication channels and caused some hard
> feelings, again. However, unlike with Discord, the decision to move to
> Discourse impacts everyone in the community, not just the people
> opting to use an alternate means of ad hoc discussion, because our
> current RFC process now means you have to be on Discourse. I think
> pausing the timeline to give the infrastructure team the time and
> space to work out the usability issues with the service is a
> reasonable measure, but if the answer winds up being "sorry, we can't
> do that" (as happened a few times with the switch from Bugzilla to
> GitHub Issues), I don't know what we do aside from accepting it as the
> new reality and potentially losing input from more members of the
> community as a result.
> 

Hi,

Do you have more information about who is unable to use Discourse and why?

-Tom

> So I very much share Roman's concern about the discussions around code
> review tools, as that's another "impacts everyone in the community"
> decision where judging consensus will be hard. Because of that, and
> orthogonal to the discussions about Discourse, I would very much
> appreciate it if we could have some idea of how consensus is being
> judged for decisions that impact the entire community. I do not have
> faith that the current process is working or tenable, and it seems
> critical (to me, at least) to solve that before making further
> infrastructure decisions.
> 
> ~Aaron
> 
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2022 at 5:37 PM Roman Lebedev via llvm-dev
> <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all.
>>
>> As most of us here learned on Jan 7, apparently, we,
>> the LLVM community, have overwhelmingly supported
>> the decision to move to Discourse.
>>
>> It already raises a question as to how said decision was made,
>> and what exactly said "majority of the community" is.
>> While it is true that the LLVM RFC process is unclear at best,
>> in this particular case the problem becomes exceptionally egregious.
>>
>> While it may be a selection bias, as a data point,
>> everybody, that i regularly talk to, in #llvm IRC
>> were just as surprised to learn of said development as I was.
>>
>> There was no indication on e.g. llvm-dev@,
>> and in fact the last mention of the migration was:
>> https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2021-June/068449.html
>> (over half a year ago!), but even if you just look at said thread,
>> there were certain comments that weren't addressed, e.g.
>> https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2021-June/068406.html
>>
>> Hopefully, the "vote" wasn't held at the discourse itself,
>> otherwise it very much mirrors certain recent & future world events,
>> and does not paint the LLVM in a good light.
>>
>> I'm fearful that the same story is bound to happen yet again
>> with GitHub Pull Request migration, that all the multitude of complaints
>> that were received each time they were requested (and that happened
>> a number of times, hopefully not to exhaust those providing said feedback!)
>> will be just swept away and ignored, and the switch be pushed through
>> regardless, in the name of a noble "lowering the barrier of entry" goal.
>> (There's similar question about discord "RFC")
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> While, I, personally, have not had much hands-on experience with
>> LLVM's discourse, mainly it's email side, I hear the situation
>> is not what the blogpost claims it to be, and there are other things
>> that aren't "just work", and that was known months ago, e.g.:
>> https://llvm.discourse.group/t/discourse-as-mailing-list-replacement-some-questions/3713/4
>>
>> Given that the hard switch point of Feb 1'st has already been set,
>> and is less than a week away, i'd like to hear some clarification
>> as to what is going on, and strongly recommend doing either of the following:
>> * STOP migration(s) due to "false start", the end status already being decided
>>    before the process even begun, and using the process just as a means
>>    to legalize the decision made beforehand.
>> * postponing the switch by a month (until March 1'st), or however long needed,
>>    effectively immediately, in order to make the migration actually possible
>>    by working out the issues that have come up during the migration.
>>
>> While what is written above is my personal view on things,
>> I do **not** believe the said view is unique to me.
>>
>> What are the foundation's thoughts on this?
>>
>> Roman
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