I have concerns about this proposal. Those concerns aren't necessarily unaddressable, but I do want to share them. My concerns fall into two broad categories. The first category is the process one. My understanding when the LLVM foundation was established was that the role of the foundation and the board was to support the community, not to make major decisions for the community. I understand there is a degree of pragmatism we have to accept - e.g. sometimes the situation forces our hand, and we need to act, even if in a sub-optimal way - but this runs dangerously close to the edge of the board dictating the solution to the community. I do want to acknowledge that I truly do thing everyone on the board is acting in good faith here. I'm not so much worried about the intentions of anyone involved so much as the appearance and precedent this sets. The second category is the proposed migration itself. I'll start by saying that the restriction in the proposal text to the *-dev lists (explicitly excluding the *commits lists) does soften my concerns substantially, but I'm left wondering about the long term plan for the commit lists. As has come up in recent threads around phabricator, I feel the commit lists play a critical role in our development practice and, almost more importantly, *culture* which is hard to replicate. I'm a bit worried that this proposal if accepted will be the camel getting his nose under the tent as it were. Specific to the dev lists, I'm very hesitant about moving from mailing lists to discourse. Why? Well, the first and most basic is I'm worried about having core infrastructure out of our own control. For all their problems, mailing lists are widely supported, there are many vendors/contractors available. For discourse, as far as I can tell, there's one vendor. It's very much a take it or leave it situation. The ability to preserve discussion archives through a transition away from discourse someday concerns me. I regularly and routinely need to dig back through llvm-dev threads which are years old. I've also recently had some severely negative customer experiences with other tools (most recently discord), and the thought of having my employability and ability to contribute to open source tied to my ability to get a response from customer service teams at some third party vendor I have no leverage with, bluntly, scares me. Second, I feel that we've overstated the difficulty of maintaining mailing lists. I have to acknowledge that I have little first hand experience administering mailman, so maybe I'm way off here. However, there are multiple commercial vendors which provide mailman hosting. TBH, this seems like a case where the foundation should simply pay for commercial hosting and migration support to mailman3. It may be this is a lot more expensive in practice than I'm imagining, but this feels like it should be our default answer and that anything else (i.e. discourse) should require major evidence of benefit over that default to be considered. Third, I'm worried that there are culture elements very tied up in our current usage of the mailing lists. As some specific examples, consider each of the following: * Discourse does not allow private responses via email. You have to use their web interface. I spent a lot of time replying privately to other contributors. I'm worried that, in practice, the extra step will cause me to follow up less, and miss even more responses. I'm particularly concerned about the impact for new contributors. (Existing contributors, I probably have an email address for already.) * Discourses does not allow cross posts (or at least, it's not clear how to do so). At least a couple times a year, we have design discussions which cross between sub-projects. This can be addressed with a process change, but it needs some discussion before the migration happens. It's not that we can't adjust our processes to the limitations of discourse; we clearly can. My concern is all of the subtle things we loose along the way. Now that I've finished up, let me explicitly state that I don't intend my comments here to be blocking. I don't think this is a good idea, or at least needs further expansion before acceptance, but I'm also not in place where I can really invest in providing a realistic alternative. At the end of the day, pragmatism does require that we give discretion to the folks actually investing their own time, and energy to keep the community running. Philip On 6/1/21 1:50 PM, Tom Stellard via llvm-dev wrote:> Hi, > > We recently[1] ran into some issues with the mailing lists that caused > us to disable automatic approval of subscriptions. Over the past few > months, the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors have been investigating > solutions to this issue and are recommending that the project move its > discussion forum from mailman to Discourse[2]. > > The proposed migration plan is to move the discussion lists (e.g *-dev, > *-users lists) to Discourse as soon as possible. The commit email lists > (*-commits lists) will remain on mailman until a not-yet-determined date > in the future, after which they will be replaced by something else. > Some commit lists alternatives include Discourse and GitHub commit > comments (but there may be others). > > Here are the reasons why the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors is > recommending this change: > > - The LLVM project discussion lists cannot be adequately maintained by > our > current volunteer infrastructure staff and without changes we run the > risk of a major outage. > > - We are able to make this change without significant impact to user's or > developer's daily workflows because Discourse supports email > subscriptions > and posting (NOTE: if you are concerned that your workflow may be > impacted > by this change, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group[3], so > they can help test your workflow with Discourse.) > > - Discourse gives us additional features that will benefit the community: > - Easy to signup and subscribe to categories > - Better moderation tools. > - Web-based user interface. > - Ability to send announcements to multiple categories to avoid > having to > cross-post community wide announcements. > > - A subset of the community (MLIR) have been experimenting with Discourse > for over a year and are able to provide feedback about this experience > to the Board of Directors. > > We did also consider one alternative, which was migrating our lists to a > mailman hosting service. However, we concluded that with all the work it > would take to migrate our lists to another service, it would be better > if we moved to a service (like Discourse) that provided more features > than what we have now. > > We understand that moving to Discourse is a change for the community and > that people may be worried about this having a negative impact on their > participation in the project. As mentioned above, we believe that this > change can be done without significant impact to anyone’s workflows. > If you disagree, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group, to > document the impact to your workflow, so we can work together to find > a solution for your issue. > > If you have any other questions or comments you can raise them on this > thread and please keep criticisms constructive and on topic. > > > LLVM Foundation Board of Directors > > [1] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2021-March/149027.html > [2] https://www.discourse.org/ > [3] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg > > _______________________________________________ > LLVM Developers mailing list > llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org > https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20210609/a4dee17f/attachment.html>
Hi folks, Since there are several questions around using Discourse, I tried to summarize these into a user guide for a potential migration. The document still contains TODOs where I don't have seen a good answer, yet: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg/blob/main/discourse_migration/userguide.md I'd be happy to get feedback on this document. If something is missing or if you have a solution to one of the open TODOs, please let me know or create a Pull Request. Best, Christian Best, Christian On Wed, Jun 9, 2021 at 7:51 PM Philip Reames via llvm-dev < llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:> I have concerns about this proposal. Those concerns aren't necessarily > unaddressable, but I do want to share them. My concerns fall into two > broad categories. > > The first category is the process one. My understanding when the LLVM > foundation was established was that the role of the foundation and the > board was to support the community, not to make major decisions for the > community. I understand there is a degree of pragmatism we have to accept > - e.g. sometimes the situation forces our hand, and we need to act, even if > in a sub-optimal way - but this runs dangerously close to the edge of the > board dictating the solution to the community. I do want to acknowledge > that I truly do thing everyone on the board is acting in good faith here. > I'm not so much worried about the intentions of anyone involved so much as > the appearance and precedent this sets. > > The second category is the proposed migration itself. I'll start by > saying that the restriction in the proposal text to the *-dev lists > (explicitly excluding the *commits lists) does soften my concerns > substantially, but I'm left wondering about the long term plan for the > commit lists. As has come up in recent threads around phabricator, I feel > the commit lists play a critical role in our development practice and, > almost more importantly, *culture* which is hard to replicate. I'm a bit > worried that this proposal if accepted will be the camel getting his nose > under the tent as it were. > > Specific to the dev lists, I'm very hesitant about moving from mailing > lists to discourse. Why? > > Well, the first and most basic is I'm worried about having core > infrastructure out of our own control. For all their problems, mailing > lists are widely supported, there are many vendors/contractors available. > For discourse, as far as I can tell, there's one vendor. It's very much a > take it or leave it situation. The ability to preserve discussion archives > through a transition away from discourse someday concerns me. I regularly > and routinely need to dig back through llvm-dev threads which are years > old. I've also recently had some severely negative customer experiences > with other tools (most recently discord), and the thought of having my > employability and ability to contribute to open source tied to my ability > to get a response from customer service teams at some third party vendor I > have no leverage with, bluntly, scares me. > > Second, I feel that we've overstated the difficulty of maintaining mailing > lists. I have to acknowledge that I have little first hand experience > administering mailman, so maybe I'm way off here. However, there are > multiple commercial vendors which provide mailman hosting. TBH, this seems > like a case where the foundation should simply pay for commercial hosting > and migration support to mailman3. It may be this is a lot more expensive > in practice than I'm imagining, but this feels like it should be our > default answer and that anything else (i.e. discourse) should require major > evidence of benefit over that default to be considered. > > Third, I'm worried that there are culture elements very tied up in our > current usage of the mailing lists. As some specific examples, consider > each of the following: > > - Discourse does not allow private responses via email. You have to > use their web interface. I spent a lot of time replying privately to other > contributors. I'm worried that, in practice, the extra step will cause me > to follow up less, and miss even more responses. I'm particularly > concerned about the impact for new contributors. (Existing contributors, I > probably have an email address for already.) > - Discourses does not allow cross posts (or at least, it's not clear > how to do so). At least a couple times a year, we have design discussions > which cross between sub-projects. This can be addressed with a process > change, but it needs some discussion before the migration happens. > > It's not that we can't adjust our processes to the limitations of > discourse; we clearly can. My concern is all of the subtle things we loose > along the way. > > Now that I've finished up, let me explicitly state that I don't intend my > comments here to be blocking. I don't think this is a good idea, or at > least needs further expansion before acceptance, but I'm also not in place > where I can really invest in providing a realistic alternative. At the end > of the day, pragmatism does require that we give discretion to the folks > actually investing their own time, and energy to keep the community > running. > > Philip > > > > On 6/1/21 1:50 PM, Tom Stellard via llvm-dev wrote: > > Hi, > > We recently[1] ran into some issues with the mailing lists that caused > us to disable automatic approval of subscriptions. Over the past few > months, the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors have been investigating > solutions to this issue and are recommending that the project move its > discussion forum from mailman to Discourse[2]. > > The proposed migration plan is to move the discussion lists (e.g *-dev, > *-users lists) to Discourse as soon as possible. The commit email lists > (*-commits lists) will remain on mailman until a not-yet-determined date > in the future, after which they will be replaced by something else. > Some commit lists alternatives include Discourse and GitHub commit > comments (but there may be others). > > Here are the reasons why the LLVM Foundation Board of Directors is > recommending this change: > > - The LLVM project discussion lists cannot be adequately maintained by our > current volunteer infrastructure staff and without changes we run the > risk of a major outage. > > - We are able to make this change without significant impact to user's or > developer's daily workflows because Discourse supports email > subscriptions > and posting (NOTE: if you are concerned that your workflow may be > impacted > by this change, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group[3], so > they can help test your workflow with Discourse.) > > - Discourse gives us additional features that will benefit the community: > - Easy to signup and subscribe to categories > - Better moderation tools. > - Web-based user interface. > - Ability to send announcements to multiple categories to avoid having > to > cross-post community wide announcements. > > - A subset of the community (MLIR) have been experimenting with Discourse > for over a year and are able to provide feedback about this experience > to the Board of Directors. > > We did also consider one alternative, which was migrating our lists to a > mailman hosting service. However, we concluded that with all the work it > would take to migrate our lists to another service, it would be better > if we moved to a service (like Discourse) that provided more features > than what we have now. > > We understand that moving to Discourse is a change for the community and > that people may be worried about this having a negative impact on their > participation in the project. As mentioned above, we believe that this > change can be done without significant impact to anyone’s workflows. > If you disagree, please contact the Infrastructure Working Group, to > document the impact to your workflow, so we can work together to find > a solution for your issue. > > If you have any other questions or comments you can raise them on this > thread and please keep criticisms constructive and on topic. > > > LLVM Foundation Board of Directors > > [1] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2021-March/149027.html > [2] https://www.discourse.org/ > [3] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg > > _______________________________________________ > LLVM Developers mailing list > llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org > https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev > > _______________________________________________ > LLVM Developers mailing list > llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org > https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev >-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20210615/02395f94/attachment-0001.html>
On Jun 9, 2021, at 10:50 AM, Philip Reames via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:> Specific to the dev lists, I'm very hesitant about moving from mailing lists to discourse. Why? > > Well, the first and most basic is I'm worried about having core infrastructure out of our own control. For all their problems, mailing lists are widely supported, there are many vendors/contractors available. For discourse, as far as I can tell, there's one vendor. It's very much a take it or leave it situation. The ability to preserve discussion archives through a transition away from discourse someday concerns me. I regularly and routinely need to dig back through llvm-dev threads which are years old. I've also recently had some severely negative customer experiences with other tools (most recently discord), and the thought of having my employability and ability to contribute to open source tied to my ability to get a response from customer service teams at some third party vendor I have no leverage with, bluntly, scares me. > > Second, I feel that we've overstated the difficulty of maintaining mailing lists. I have to acknowledge that I have little first hand experience administering mailman, so maybe I'm way off here. >Hi Philip, First, despite the similar names, Discord is very different than Discourse. Here I’m only commenting about Discourse, I have no opinion about Discord. In this case, I think we need to highly weight the opinions of the people actively mainlining the existing systems. It has become clear that the priority isn’t “control our own lists”, it is “make sure they stay up” and “get LLVM people out of maintaining them”. The ongoing load of maintaining these lists (including moderation) and of dealing with the security issues that keep coming up are carried by several individuals, not by the entire community. I’m concerned about those individuals, but I’m also more broadly concerned about *any* individuals being solely responsible for LLVM infra. Effectively every case we’ve had where an individual has driving LLVM infra turns out to be a problem. LLVM as a project isn’t good at running web scale infra, but we highly depend on it. It seems clear to me that we should outsource this to a proven vendor. Your concerns about discourse seem very similar to the discussion about moving to Github (being a single vendor who was once much smaller than Microsoft). I think your concerns are best addressed by having the IWG propose an answer to “what is our plan if Discourse-the-company goes sideways?" -Chris -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20210621/48a9116e/attachment.html>