llvm dev - Jun 2021 - [cfe-dev] Mailing List Status Update

On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 3:53 PM Chris Lattner via cfe-dev <
cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 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.
>
I agree that the maintenance issue is definitely a problem which needs to
be solved. And there is some urgency, given the recent problems which
resulted in a need to manually subscribe people to the lists.

But, the proposal on the table doesn't appear to actually address this
issue, because the maintainers of llvm mailman will still continue to be
responsible for keeping it functioning, for the mailing lists which were
not proposed to be migrated. On the other hand, having osci.io run a
mailman3 service for us does seem to be a way to solve this -- and doesn't
require discarding mailing lists entirely.

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?"
>
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On Jun 22, 2021, at 6:01 PM, James Y Knight <jyknight at google.com>
wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 3:53 PM Chris Lattner via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at
lists.llvm.org <mailto:cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:
> On Jun 9, 2021, at 10:50 AM, Philip Reames via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at
lists.llvm.org <mailto: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.
> 
> I agree that the maintenance issue is definitely a problem which needs to
be solved. And there is some urgency, given the recent problems which resulted
in a need to manually subscribe people to the lists.
> 
> But, the proposal on the table doesn't appear to actually address this
issue, because the maintainers of llvm mailman will still continue to be
responsible for keeping it functioning, for the mailing lists which were not
proposed to be migrated. On the other hand, having osci.io
<http://osci.io/> run a mailman3 service for us does seem to be a way to
solve this -- and doesn't require discarding mailing lists entirely.

I’m not deeply familiar with osci.io, but hosted mailman services all suffer
from a major problem: they don’t solve the moderation problem.

More generally, I don’t see how that addresses the many other issues that were
raised repeatedly on this thread.

-Chris

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