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

On 6/23/21 6:34 AM, Aaron Ballman via cfe-dev wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 12:51 AM Chris Lattner via cfe-dev
> <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>> 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> 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.
>>
>>
>> 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.
> Can you explain the moderation problem a bit? As a current mailing
> list moderator, I'm unaware of unsolved issues in this space and the
> only mentions about moderation on this thread are vague "we could have
> better moderation tools" kind of comments without justification as to
> why they're important enough to necessitate a switch away from email.
Same here (though I'm only moderating a low-traffic list).

>
>> More generally, I don’t see how that addresses the many other issues
that were raised repeatedly on this thread.
> We went through many of these same discussions a while ago about
> moving away from IRC and email at the same time. There was no
> community consensus during that discussion, but for various reasons
> the end result was a fracturing of the community (some people went to
> Discord, some people stayed on IRC, and now both communities have to
> tell members "if you don't get an answer here, try on the other
> service or the mailing lists"). IMO, this left us with a community
> that's less approachable because new people are never really certain
> if they're asking their questions "in the right place",
especially
> when a failure to get an answer to their question requires them to try
> again on a different service. I am worried that a switch from email on
> the -dev mailing lists to using Discourse will result in a similar
> fracturing, as discussions will still be possible via email on
> -commits. To me personally, the possibility of further fracturing the
> community is a concern I think we need to take very seriously.
+1

>
> ~Aaron
>
>> -Chris
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> cfe-dev mailing list
>> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
>> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
> _______________________________________________
> cfe-dev mailing list
> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev

>>> 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. . . .
    >>> Second, I feel that we've overstated the difficulty of
maintaining mailing lists.
    >>
    >> 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.
   >
    > Can you explain the moderation problem a bit? As a current mailing
    > list moderator, I'm unaware of unsolved issues in this space and
the
    > only mentions about moderation on this thread are vague "we could
have
    > better moderation tools" kind of comments without justification as
to
    > why they're important enough to necessitate a switch away from
email.

    Same here (though I'm only moderating a low-traffic list).

Same here.

    >> More generally, I don’t see how that addresses the many other
issues that were raised repeatedly on this thread.
    >
    > We went through many of these same discussions a while ago about
    > moving away from IRC and email at the same time. There was no
    > community consensus during that discussion, but for various reasons
    > the end result was a fracturing of the community (some people went to
    > Discord, some people stayed on IRC, and now both communities have to
    > tell members "if you don't get an answer here, try on the
other
    > service or the mailing lists").

Wouldn't we all agree that this is a highly undesirable situation?

    > I am worried that a switch from email on
    > the -dev mailing lists to using Discourse will result in a similar
    > fracturing, as discussions will still be possible via email on
    > -commits. To me personally, the possibility of further fracturing the
    > community is a concern I think we need to take very seriously.

    +1

+2

It already shows this effect - some discussions are going on on Discourse, the
majority appear to still be here in llvm-dev. I've no idea what's going
on on Discord or IRC.
How many ways do we want to split this community???

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