llvm dev - Nov 2021 - IMPORTANT: LLVM Bugzilla migration

On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 3:36 PM Anton Korobeynikov <anton at
korobeynikov.info>
wrote:
> > If we can attribute it to an anonymous entity, e.g. by putting
> "Anonymous LLVM Contributor 123 wrote:" at the top of a comment
by llvmbot,
> at least readers can understand whether two comments on a bug are from the
> same person or from different people, for example. Can we at least do
> something like that?
> We do this for issues. They are marked as submitted by "LLVM Bugzilla
> Contributor".
>
As I said, the purpose would be to allow disambiguating multiple anonymous
contributors, e.g. by suffixing a unique number to each anonymous
contributor. The reply misses that point.
> And, if such a problem exists, I think we ought to address that problem
> before migration.
> They had more than half a year to submit a survey and received
> multiple notifications. We are not going to delay the migration due to
> this.

My understanding from what you said is that you have sent a single
notification to each user back in April. (Plus a mailing list post, before
that, in March.) If that is enough to capture most active users, great! But
it sounds like it was not. You can't blame the users if a large percentage
of them have a problem. That points to a problem in the process, not the
people.
> Some other questions that pop into my mind:
> Great! Thanks for the questions. Probably they should have asked 2
> years ago. You will be able to check the results by yourself after the
> migration.

It feels to me like you're being intentionally disingenuous here, and that
makes me sad. My questions are about the migration plan/process/decisions *as
it is now finally implemented*, not the initial ideas for migration from
2019. I don't think that a request that the final plan be written down and
reviewable by others is out-of-line or unexpected.

Until very recently, it seemed like wasn't even clear that a migration
would be feasible under the proposed scheme at all, and that the tooling
was still under active development. Now that it's clear that it can be done
(which is great news!), the next step I expected was a detailed writeup of
the final characteristics of the implementation, and what things are
expected to look like afterwards. Instead, at basically the first point
where it's known that this is actually feasible, it's too late to ask
any
questions? There's no documentation of what's been implemented? No
description even of what users should expect after migration? I do not
understand this.

Certainly it's possible for a project to turn out successfully without a
written design, documentation, or review. But isn't that unnecessarily
risky?
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On 11/22/21 15:45, James Y Knight via llvm-dev wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 3:36 PM Anton Korobeynikov <anton at
korobeynikov.info <mailto:anton at korobeynikov.info>> wrote:
> 
>      > If we can attribute it to an anonymous entity, e.g. by putting
"Anonymous LLVM Contributor 123 wrote:" at the top of a comment by
llvmbot, at least readers can understand whether two comments on a bug are from
the same person or from different people, for example. Can we at least do
something like that?
>     We do this for issues. They are marked as submitted by "LLVM
Bugzilla
>     Contributor".
> 
> 
> As I said, the purpose would be to allow disambiguating multiple anonymous
contributors, e.g. by suffixing a unique number to each anonymous contributor.
The reply misses that point.
> 
>      > And, if such a problem exists, I think we ought to address that
problem before migration.
>     They had more than half a year to submit a survey and received
>     multiple notifications. We are not going to delay the migration due to
>     this.
> 
> 
> My understanding from what you said is that you have sent a single
notification to each user back in April. (Plus a mailing list post, before that,
in March.) If that is enough to capture most active users, great! But it sounds
like it was not. You can't blame the users if a large percentage of them
have a problem. That points to a problem in the process, not the people.
> 
>      > Some other questions that pop into my mind:
>     Great! Thanks for the questions. Probably they should have asked 2
>     years ago. You will be able to check the results by yourself after the
>     migration.
> 
> 
> It feels to me like you're being intentionally disingenuous here, and
that makes me sad. My questions are about the migration plan/process/decisions
/as it is now finally implemented/, not the initial ideas for migration from
2019. I don't think that a request that the final plan be written down and
reviewable by others is out-of-line or unexpected.
> 

I know it's hard to keep track of all the email threads, but it definitely
would have been more helpful to ask these questions closer
to Oct 11, when Anton outlined the how the migration would work.  I
understand the desire to have the best possible data, but at some
point we have to move forward.  For many months the migration was
blocked due to lack of communication from GitHub.  We finally have
their attention now, and we don't want to lose it again.

We have been discussing this on the Infrastructure Working Group
meetings since August.  There has been a lot of time on the list to
ask questions and give feedback.  I really think we need to just
move forward.

Anton has already committed his time to do the migration this weekend.
If it doesn't happen then, who is going to volunteer to do it?  Anton
doesn't have unlimited free time and has already invested a lot of effort
into the migration.

-Tom
> Until very recently, it seemed like wasn't even clear that a migration
would be feasible under the proposed scheme at all, and that the tooling was
still under active development. Now that it's clear that it can be done
(which is great news!), the next step I expected was a detailed writeup of the
final characteristics of the implementation, and what things are expected to
look like afterwards. Instead, at basically the first point where it's known
that this is actually feasible, it's too late to ask any questions?
There's no documentation of what's been implemented? No description even
of what users should expect after migration? I do not understand this.
> 
> Certainly it's possible for a project to turn out successfully without
a written design, documentation, or review. But isn't that unnecessarily
risky?
> 
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>

>> > If we can attribute it to an anonymous entity, e.g. by putting
"Anonymous LLVM Contributor 123 wrote:" at the top of a comment by
llvmbot, at least readers can understand whether two comments on a bug are from
the same person or from different people, for example. Can we at least do
something like that?
>> We do this for issues. They are marked as submitted by "LLVM
Bugzilla
>> Contributor".
> As I said, the purpose would be to allow disambiguating multiple anonymous
contributors, e.g. by suffixing a unique number to each anonymous contributor.
The reply misses that point.
Thanks for the comment. However, no, it does not. We cannot suffix and
separate different anonymous contributions. I do not want to dig deep
into details, but some regulations require us to ensure that the
author of the data cannot be traced back when the origin of anonymized
data is removed. This requirement is quite vague and quite new, but
still we have to comply with it. One way of doing this is to "pool"
all anonymous contributions so they will be indistinguishable from
each other from the author standpoint.

-- 
With best regards, Anton Korobeynikov
Department of Statistical Modelling, Saint Petersburg State University

On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 3:45 PM James Y Knight via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 3:36 PM Anton Korobeynikov <
> anton at korobeynikov.info> wrote:
>
>> > If we can attribute it to an anonymous entity, e.g. by putting
>> "Anonymous LLVM Contributor 123 wrote:" at the top of a
comment by llvmbot,
>> at least readers can understand whether two comments on a bug are from
the
>> same person or from different people, for example. Can we at least do
>> something like that?
>> We do this for issues. They are marked as submitted by "LLVM
Bugzilla
>> Contributor".
>>
>
> As I said, the purpose would be to allow disambiguating multiple anonymous
> contributors, e.g. by suffixing a unique number to each anonymous
> contributor. The reply misses that point.
>
> > And, if such a problem exists, I think we ought to address that
problem
>> before migration.
>> They had more than half a year to submit a survey and received
>> multiple notifications. We are not going to delay the migration due to
>> this.
>
>
> My understanding from what you said is that you have sent a single
> notification to each user back in April. (Plus a mailing list post, before
> that, in March.) If that is enough to capture most active users, great! But
> it sounds like it was not. You can't blame the users if a large
percentage
> of them have a problem. That points to a problem in the process, not the
> people.
>
> > Some other questions that pop into my mind:
>> Great! Thanks for the questions. Probably they should have asked 2
>> years ago. You will be able to check the results by yourself after the
>> migration.
>
>
> It feels to me like you're being intentionally disingenuous here, and
that
> makes me sad. My questions are about the migration plan/process/decisions
*as
> it is now finally implemented*, not the initial ideas for migration from
> 2019. I don't think that a request that the final plan be written down
and
> reviewable by others is out-of-line or unexpected.
>
> Until very recently, it seemed like wasn't even clear that a migration
> would be feasible under the proposed scheme at all, and that the tooling
> was still under active development. Now that it's clear that it can be
done
> (which is great news!), the next step I expected was a detailed writeup of
> the final characteristics of the implementation, and what things are
> expected to look like afterwards. Instead, at basically the first point
> where it's known that this is actually feasible, it's too late to
ask any
> questions? There's no documentation of what's been implemented? No
> description even of what users should expect after migration? I do not
> understand this.
>
+1 with every James said, in particular this last paragraph.

It is amazing that this project finally looks close to completion, but as
far as I can tell (and I'm following the iwg@ mailing list as well by the
way) there hasn't been a single mockup or test instance that has been
shared with the community so that we can have an idea of what does it look
like.
There has been very little communication or documentation on this in 2021
as far as I can tell. We just had the LLVM dev meeting last week, this was
a perfect opportunity for a demo of the proposed end result and a round
table. In comparison, the previous big migrations (SVN to GitHub) went
through multiple stages of prototype and demos that were openly shared with
the community.

Can we get this demo done and have a proper review of the state of the
post-migration? (before any migration happens obviously)

Thanks,


-- 
Mehdi




>
> Certainly it's possible for a project to turn out successfully without
a
> written design, documentation, or review. But isn't that unnecessarily
> risky?
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>
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