llvm dev - Jan 2022 - LLVM Discourse migration: goals justify means?

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

On 1/26/22 14:36, Roman Lebedev via llvm-dev 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.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what "Mailing List Mode"
is, so let me try to clear this up:

"Mailing List Mode" is a convenient way to watch all Discourse
categories
at once.  The mailman equivalent of this would be if you subscribed to
all the LLVM mailing lists at the same time.

There is another way to watch all the Discourse categories.  You can go
to your notification preferences and add every category (and sub-category)
to the list of categories that you want to watch.  Watching a category is
the mailman equivalent of subscribing to a single mailing list.

When you watch a category, you will receive emails for every new post in
the category.  Turning "Mailing List Mode" off does not prevent users
from
receiving emails for new posts.

This is relevant now because "Mailing List Mode" was recently disabled
for
everyone on Discourse. This was necessary because we were running up against
the daily email limits for free accounts on Discourse.

Whether or not the "Mailing List Mode" feature is available it is
not recommended that people use this feature.  It is recommended
that instead users watch only the categories that they are interested
in.  This will help reduce your own email load and also reduce the load
on the Discourse server (number of emails per month is limited based on
the organization's subscription type).

I hope this helps clear things up.

-Tom
> 
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev

I want to chime in to say that Roman is definitely not alone in his 
impressions here.  I have previously shared my objections to the 
original proposal, and will not repeat myself.

I don't have the energy to engage in this discussion, and have already 
decided to put up with this and deal with the fallout. Given that, 
please do not expect further response from me on this topic.

Philip

On 1/26/22 2:36 PM, Roman Lebedev via llvm-dev 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
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/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

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.

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
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev

On 1/26/2022 5:36 PM, Roman Lebedev via llvm-dev 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")
I agree with virtually everything else that has been said in this 
thread, so I'll limit this to saying things that I haven't seen said
yet.

If you look at the history of the big infrastructure changes LLVM has 
made in the recent past, there's a worrying trend. The first big change 
I'm thinking of was the move from SVN to git via github. The discussion 
period for this change was quite long (several years), but the actual 
migration I remember as being relatively smooth. More recently, we had 
the move from Bugzilla to Github issues. The discussion period was 
similarly long, but the migration was far from smooth: the final 
notification (including things contributors needed to do) seemed to come 
out of nowhere, with short timetables, and over a holiday week, and the 
actual conversion process ran into several technical issues (to be fair, 
many of them were not easily foreseeable).

Now we have the migration to Discourse, where the previous discussion 
was arguably more contentious than the bug move and seemed to be left in 
a "no consensus" state. And again we have a very-little-notice 
announcement of the move, including a late Friday night or early 
Saturday morning announcement on a holiday weekend. And again, there are 
technical issues--the "mailing list mode" feature. However, this one 
really ought to have been foreseen: the amount of emails that llvm 
mailing lists send out a day should be *really* easy to estimate, so how 
is it a surprise that we're using too many emails?

The worrying thing is the extrapolation to the "next" infrastructure 
change, the move to PRs... which is the most contentious of the lot, 
with several contributors outright saying that it may cause them to stop 
contributing altogether. The infrastructure process clearly *isn't* 
working well right now, and I think we need to step back and fix that 
process before risking contributor loss.

I originally wasn't going to bring this up, but I think the decision to 
disable "mailing list mode" absolutely needs to part of the "what
went
wrong" postmortem. There may be a good reason why the problem of LLVM 
discourse sending too many emails wasn't foreseeable beforehand, but I'm
not seeing it right now--it's important to understand where the blind 
spots of the infrastructure group exist right now. But the communication 
of the disabling of this feature really leaves something to be desired: 
it was announced on Discourse, after it had been disabled, so that 
everybody who was solely relying on it for email *never saw they had 
been cut off*. I myself only found out about this because it was 
mentioned in the IRC channel.

In a broader sense, I want to part with this observation. In my 
experience, large projects develop a kind of "in-group", a set of
people
who need to be interacted with to get things done in the project. Of the 
projects I've worked with, LLVM has had the most opaque
"in-group", in
the sense that it's difficult for a beginner (or even more experienced 
contributors) to figure out who you need to get to review a patch, or 
when you've got enough agreement on an RFC to move forward with 
implementation. This is a bigger issue with LLVM in general, but the 
risk with respect to infrastructure in particular is that I am extremely 
worried that the LLVM infrastructure group is pushing away much or all 
of the "in-group", and that has incumbent risks for the future health
of
the project as a whole.

-- 
Joshua Cranmer

Roman,

I would really appreciate if you would ask questions about the migration instead
of making assumptions, accusations, and demands. Those involved in the migration
are happy to answer them.

In any best laid out plan, there are unexpected things that pop up. In this
particular case, we found out that mailing list mode was generating a ton of
email that caused us to go over our current email limits and impact the sites
functionality. We asked for the limit to be overridden until the migration was
complete and that was not possible. In an effort to keep things functioning, we
disabled "mailing list mode". This is not a feature that was present
before. There was no button you could click on lists.llvm.org that automatically
subscribed you to all the mailing lists. Most people are not subscribed to every
mailing list.

I’ve been working on LLVM for over 15 years and maintaining the LLVM lists for
the majority of that time. I understand the importance of email for people in
our community. That importance has been made very clear in the many discussions
about Discourse (one the lists, in working groups, in round tables, at dev mtgs,
to me, to the board as a whole).

There are ample ways for people to get involved:
1) Participate in the Infrastructure Working Group
2) Read the LLVM Foundation board meeting minutes to see what the board is
talking about. Ask questions if you want to know more
3) Email the LLVM Foundation board directly or use the mailing list (now
Discourse)
4) Email me personally. Ask me for a video chat or phone call. I am here to
answer questions and to take feedback.

I hope that you can have some patience and compassion for people who are doing
the migration. I am very sorry that we had to take this step, but it does not
mean its permanent and it does not prevent you from using email.

-Tanya


> On Jan 26, 2022, at 2:36 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
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
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