[Mlir-commits] [mlir] [mlir] List lead maintainers for MLIR (PR #146928)

[Oleksandr Alex Zinenko]

ftynse wrote:

> This is your inference, absolutely not my intent, please don't assume bad intent. This isn't conductive to a reasonable change. There is no accusation here.

I'm sorry if that wording is not ideal. I'm trying to follow your style of communication in hopes that it would be more understandable to you, but I may not be getting it entirely right. There is no bad intent in my communication either.

> Here the area team can nominate maintainer, not decide who is/isn't a maintainer. So you made here a nomination, we have to look into how these are approved then.

You are correct, we are making a nomination here. There is no process for approving these because top-level projects are now expected to have lead maintainers from the start (not sure what the policy was when MLIR was first merged, but that is not the point here). This is why we immediately raised the issue to the Project Council.

> You also didn't answer me explicitly on my self-nomination (it got ignored instead), I could also just send a PR of my own after all: nothing is specific to the area team here and it does not seem to.

> Fact is that I disagree with the conclusion of a process for which I don't have access to the reasoning, and for which despite asking privately I couldn't get clearer information.

> I would also think that there shouldn't be double standards: if you are asking me to elaborate on my objection to a nomination, I should be entitled to hear about objections to my initial self-nomination don't I?

You did not ask about your self-nomination specifically. You did question the process, formulated a hypothesis about the lack of due diligence and stated your disagreement with the conclusion. I tried to address those by providing more details on the process than I did previously and by refuting your hypothesis.

And yes, you can absolutely send a PR of your own, nominating yourself or any other eligible contributor. So can anyone. We are not trying to override that. This is exactly what I was saying as both Renato and Aaron seem to have understood from my answer.

For transparency, here are my answers from the private conversation you are mentioning:

> ftynse: You said "everything but tensor compiler", so the proposed solution to have you on "core category", which covers core IR and ex-standard but non-tensor dialects, sounds like a reasonable compromise
>
> ftynse: FWIW, accommodating this while not having a special place for the tensor compiler was one of the reasons why these categories were introduced
>
> ftynse: I'm saying that we collectively came up with these nominations through a month-long process and I will stand by this decision. We took multiple factors into consideration, and the current proposal for lead maintainers made most sense to all of us.

Just to clarify if this may be confusing, I implied that I would stand by _the area team decision to nominate these individuals_.  I also believe that such matters are better discussed publicly because they concern the entire community.

The answer about why you haven't been nominated as lead maintainer (even though there is still no direct question about that!) lies right there: you did not nominate yourself, and we made an effort to accommodate your actual request. The tensor compiler is a significant – and most contentious – part of MLIR, likely requiring most work from the lead maintainers. Historically, you have also interacted less with its main dialects (Linalg, TOSA, memref), so we did not want to force these on you either. It looks like Aaron has the same reading of your nomination as we did. For reference, we did have self-nominations saying just "Everything."

> I also got very conflicting messaging where one member of the area team said "the lead one is just area team copied. As it would be the current escalation path - but should only be an escalation path", which seemed reasonable to me (also the process must be bootstrapped...), but then I got a very different messaging from @ftynse which denied this was the case and insisted these were actually individual nominations.

I have a different reading of that conversation, where both me and another member of the Area Team were involved, but I cannot disclose exact wording of a private communication without that person's agreement. In what I see, they were initially confused by your question and thought it referred to the membership in the Area Team itself, not nominations. You can try to clarify it with them.

> I probably didn't make my point clear: there is a situation with a disagreement somehow, and the area team is supposed to be the facilitator for such cases, but since the disagreement stem from an action of the area team, that means you have to facilitate a decision on this action you initiated, this is what I meant by "judge and jury".

This is also why we immediately raised the issue to the Project Council. It sounds dubious to serve as a moderator in a discussion where the Area Team is also one of the participants. 

> So basically I self-nominating myself, I got ignored/rejected by the area team, without being reached to about it, and then when asking privately to some member of the area team questions about it to be able to understand I receive a non-answer along the line of "this is the decision, I stand by it".
> And you don't see why I would have a problem with this?

We all understand that you are upset and may feel hurt because you were not nominated by us. This does not mean we do not value your contribution to the project, as I already mentioned above. Quite the opposite, we were satisfying what looked like an explicit request from your part.

I also don't believe we are avoiding a discussion or trying to shut you down, and we are happy to work towards a consensus and facilitate consensus elsewhere. It is, however, difficult, to do so without further specific questions or concerns. If you keep repeating a variation of the same question, you are likely to get the same answer.

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/146928