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

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

On Thu, 27 Jan 2022 at 16:43, Joshua Cranmer via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 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).
>
Let me just clarify a point here... The bugzilla migration process was
*very* hard.

All those years waiting for the majority of people in the community were
actually spent by Anton K painstakingly solving every issue that was raised.

The number of back and forth emails between Anton and Github people and the
level of support he got from them is appalling.

Most people probably had forgotten about it all when Anton finally broke
through and saw the light at the end of the tunnel.

So, while I agree with everything else you said above and below, the
bugzilla migration wasn't quite like the others.

What that means to the Phab->PR move is left as an exercise to the reader...
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> On Jan 27, 2022, at 8:42 AM, Joshua Cranmer via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at
lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 
> 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?
It is really easy to throw out accusations like it should have been really easy
to estimate and that we should have known. There were steps in the process that
did change along the way even when we had laid out a plan. Things happen that
are outside our control.

I’m sorry that a transition did not go absolutely perfectly. Obviously, we want
things to go smooth. Many of the things we have done (ie bugzilla migration of
that size) have not been done before and we may be the first people to do them.
There will always be some things that pop up.
> 
> 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.
This was actually posted BEFORE I disabled it. However, because of the email
situation were were in with emails being throttled, it apparently did not get
sent. That was not intentional. Again, some compassion and understanding would
be nice.
> 
> 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.
The Infrastructure Working group is open to anyone. 

-Tanya
> 
> -- 
> Joshua Cranmer
> 
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