llvm dev - Oct 2015 - RFC: Introducing an LLVM Community Code of Conduct

Let me skip most of the CoC comments which I largely agree with, both in
terms of the proposed CoC and the need for having one in first place.

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 09:38:57PM +0200, Joachim Durchholz via llvm-dev
wrote:
> Actually I'm not yet convinced that LLVM really needs a CoC. If people
have
> been reluctant to join, I'm really, really sure it's not due to
lack of CoC
> or enforcement; it's just what people say, but you really need to give
them
> ways to get their toes wet without embarrasing themselves too much -
> participate in GSoC, mark problems as "easy to fix", set up a
queue for
> incoming patches and make that process transparent (the latter one is
really
> hard, I have up on contributing to Guava because the Guava team's
> decisionmaking is entirely inside of Google) - I don't know how much of
this
> is already happening in LLVM because obviously I don't need that kind
of
> encouragement, but that's what I have seen has worked resp. has not
worked.
I think this goes much more to the heart of community interaction than
the CoC did. Things like seemingly ignored contributions and bug reports
are IMO far more damaging and off-putting for newcomers.
> Also, being welcoming isn't necessary high on the priority list. LLVM
is
> infrastructure, and you need a different mindest. I was just made aware of
> this posting:
> https://plus.google.com/+KristianK%C3%B6hntopp/posts/9ZL862AgjqE
> He's exaggerating, but he does bring the point home that projects
should not
> necessarily welcome everybody. So... what people does LLVM want to feel
> welcome, and what kind of people does LLVM want to look unattractive for?
I don't exactly agree with that post, but it highlights one important
aspect for any person not used to the LLVM community. "We welcome
contributions, but we also require contributors to work with us."
Consider me a privileged white male, but I don't see the problems
justifying (!) the introduction a CoC compared to all the other relevant
social issues that are more important in my perception.

Joerg

On 13 October 2015 at 21:59, Joerg Sonnenberger via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> I think this goes much more to the heart of community interaction than
> the CoC did. Things like seemingly ignored contributions and bug reports
> are IMO far more damaging and off-putting for newcomers.
This is a very good point, and one that agrees with my idea that we're
only doing this because everyone else is doing, too.

> "We welcome contributions, but we also require contributors to work
with us."
This is what he was getting at. Final words: "They don't want your
contribution and they don't want you, because you are not helping.
Unless you do, in which case you are like them". Basically, as a
spectrum, we can all use similar rationales, with very different
outcomes.

We had people *demanding* their bugs being fixed because millions of
users rely on their products. The use case for the unfixed bugs are
normally so specialised, that virtually nobody else in the world care.
The come back is usually in the form of "you are the experts, I'm not,
therefore you have to fix the bugs I don't understand about".

That kind of behaviour, in my view, is disrespectful to begin with. It
assumes a the commercial model should apply for everyone. In some
cases, I replied saying it would be unlikely that those bugs would be
fixed, to which the OP probably got upset and left thinking our
community is unhelpful. Should I have acted differently? Should we
strive to fix every possible bug, ever?

Another bug in RedHat and Debian unstable for AArch64 which I can't
reproduce because I don't have those systems installed. Should I
uninstall one of my production systems to install theirs and fix the
problem? Should I ask them for hardware / software so I can reproduce
the problem? Or should I rely on them to fix their own problems? My
choice was the second one, but I can see reason on all three. Can we
blame people that don't care at all? Should we force people to care
more than they are able to?

Open source is past the time of peace and love, and now it's all about
money. If we force too much, companies will leave, fork, re-invent the
wheel. If we force too little, benevolent dictatorships will form, and
then become the norm, even later, when behaviour is forced.

All in all, our community has stayed very sane over the same years
many others went in disarray.

The only issue I see recently is an potential internal power struggle
encouraging fast and incomplete commits, as long as the bots are
green, which IMHO is unhelpful and often destroy other people's work.
The view that more contributions equals more community kudos is the
enforcer of that behaviour and I don't think that's a valuable metric.
I'd rather have fewer good quality and considerate commits than
thousands of half-backed features, but that's probably just me.

Even that, is completely independent of ethnicity, religion, gender,
blah, blah, blah. so the original argument is *still* invalid.

cheers,
--renato

> Open source is past the time of peace and love,
Actually FOSS is a child of hate: RMS hating the new ways of software 
development.

 > and now it's all about money.

I do not think that making money is a bad thing in itself.

What's not going work is trying to impose commercial ethics on charity 
work and vice versa.

Am 13.10.2015 um 23:32 schrieb Renato Golin via
llvm-dev:
> We had people *demanding* their bugs being fixed because millions of
> users rely on their products. [...]
> The come back is usually in the form of "you are the experts, I'm
not,
> therefore you have to fix the bugs I don't understand about".
Fair enough.
> That kind of behaviour, in my view, is disrespectful to begin with. It
> assumes a the commercial model should apply for everyone.
Yeah, it's applying commercial ethics to charity work.

 > In some
> cases, I replied saying it would be unlikely that those bugs would be
> fixed, to which the OP probably got upset and left thinking our
> community is unhelpful. Should I have acted differently? Should we
> strive to fix every possible bug, ever?
Maybe this would work better:

Tell him that his problem is commercial, and the priorities of neither 
paid nor charity contributors to LLVM share his priorities.
Since he's a business, his approach to getting his problems solved is to 
pay somebody to do it. Apple has been paying person-decades to get its 
priorities addressed in LLVM; if his product is relevant to millions of 
users, he should be able to pay a person-month or so to get his problem 
fixed.

Just my way of addressing that kind of issue, YMMV :-)

Regards,
Jo