Hello! The purpose of this email is to start a discussion about our code review
tools. No decisions have been made about changing tools. The idea behind a
timeline is so that information could be gathered in a timely manner. The
Infrastructure Working Group was formed to bring together community members who
have an experience and/or passion regarding infrastructure. Anyone can
participate in this working group and like the LLVM Foundation, the minutes are
all made public.
The LLVM Foundation’s mission is to support the LLVM project and help ensure the
health and productivity of of the community and this is done through numerous
ways including infrastructure. I do not think it is a negative thing that the
foundation board of directors would be discussing our current tools and
gathering information how how well they work and how we can make them better. As
the legal entity who bares financial and legal responsibility for a lot of the
infrastructure, this would make sense. This also makes sense because of the
people involved who care a lot about LLVM and the project. But, the LLVM
Foundation does not pay for Phabricator and we are very grateful for Google’s
support of this critical piece of our infrastructure.
Regarding Phabricator, there are a couple of pieces of information that were
provided to the LLVM Foundation by maintainers (maybe previous it sounds like)
of this instance and how we may need to look into alternative ways to support
it. In addition, Phacility itself has publicly stated that it is winding down
operations.
(https://admin.phacility.com/phame/post/view/11/phacility_is_winding_down_operations/).
Lastly, there are questions about why we are not using GitHub pull requests as
we are on GitHub and that might be the natural path to take for a number of
reasons.
The above reasons are why the RFC was written. Perhaps it wasn’t written in the
best way, but I also feel like it is being read in a negative way which is
incredibly disappointing given I don’t feel there is a valid reason for this.
-Tanya
> On Oct 5, 2021, at 11:35 AM, Renato Golin via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at
lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 5 Oct 2021 at 19:16, Tom Stellard <tstellar at redhat.com
<mailto:tstellar at redhat.com>> wrote:
> However, it's not a good position for the Board to be responsible
> for something that it doesn't have control over. If Google decided to
stop hosting
> Phabricator for some reason (unlikely, but not impossible), the Board would
be
> responsible for finding a replacement.
>
> Sorry, this is a very weak reason for such a strong worded "RFC".
>
> I _cannot_ imagine "Google" stopping to support something so
quickly as to leave the foundation without recourse. And even if they did, *no
one* would blame the foundation for that.
>
> Even if you ignore all the effort that hundreds of their engineers have
done over the past decade to the project, this would hurt Google more than
anyone else. It's a far fetched concern.
>
> And if the foundation wants "control" of a piece of
infrastructure that Google has been maintaining for years, then this is a
different discussion. Hopefully one that doesn't involve unilateral
decisions.
>
> The main risk is that Phabricator is no longer maintained upstream.
> There was already an issue[1] recently where the arc tool stopped working
and won't
> be fixed upstream. Using unmaintained software is a bigger risk.
>
> I don't like using unmaintained software either, but I think our Phab
has had more attention than the upstream project. And no one has to use arc, I
certainly never have.
>
> Don't get me wrong, I don't like Phab and I think Github would
bring new people to the project, but it's gotta be done the right way, and
pushing it isn't it.
>
> We, meaning the LLVM Board of Directors. And really the problem isn't
the self-hosting
> so much as it's the lack of an enforceable maintenance agreement the
Foundation and the
> maintainers.
>
> The problem isn't self-hosting at all, given that Google is doing that.
(apologies, I assumed otherwise earlier).
>
> Neither is maintenance, given Google is doing that too.
>
> The only thing that's left is control, and I don't really
understand why this is important, as I explained above.
>
> cheers,
> --renato
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20211005/f7b42c18/attachment.html>