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

On 1/27/22 12:35, Philip Reames via llvm-dev wrote:
> 
> On 1/27/22 09:31, Tanya Lattner via llvm-dev wrote:
>>> 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.
> 
> Speaking as someone who joined the IWG, provided strongly negative feedback
on the proposed discourse transitions, and then resigned because I didn't
want my name associated with an effort likely to be so disastrous, I strongly
question this assertion.
> 
> "We value your feedback" is pretty meaningless when that feedback
is ignored.
> 
It's hard to know how to respond to this without the specifics, but I would
say that in general, choosing to do something different does not mean that
feedback was ignored.

 From my perspective, I feel like a lot of the frustration around some
of these infrastructure projects could be avoided by improved communication
to the community about the status of these projects.  This is something
the Board[1] has discussed in the past and we've been trying to recruit
people from the iwg[2] to help with this.  If anyone wants to help with
this, please start a thread on the IWG Discourse[3] category.

-Tom

[1] https://foundation.llvm.org/documents/minutes/2021-11-03-Meeting-Minutes.pdf
[2] https://groups.google.com/u/1/a/llvm.org/g/iwg/c/NcNR5hWSo9c
[3] https://llvm.discourse.group/c/infrastructure/iwg/42
> (Apologies if this comes across as too snarky.  I tried to reword this a
couple of times, but couldn't find a way to do so without loosing the
important point.)
> 
> Philip
> 
> 
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On Thu, Jan 27, 2022 at 4:04 PM Tom Stellard via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> From my perspective, I feel like a lot of the frustration around some
> of these infrastructure projects could be avoided by improved communication
> to the community about the status of these projects.

Yes, this is the problem. For both issue-tracking and mailing-list
migration, I think that the announcement of an *imminent* migration came as
a surprise to most of the community. Certainly, with Bugzilla->GitHub, it
was widely communicated that we planned to migrate, at some point, and
there was consensus that this was a good idea. Yet, it was still a surprise
that it was going to happen imminently, with no prior review from (or
communcation with) the community as to the *actual final plan*. For the
discourse migration, it was a surprise that it's going to be happening at
all -- the previous thread ended with questions, not conclusions, and there
was no follow-up until "It's happening now". Although, apparently,
if
I'd've read the Foundation board minutes, I would've known...

It quite surprises me that, from all appearances, the LLVM IWG is not
actually the entity coordinating or running these projects, but rather that
apparently they're run by the LLVM Foundation Board, completely
independently from the IWG. Now, I'm not in either group, so maybe I'm
mistaken, but:
 Discourse: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg/issues/47 "figure out if the
IWG should help with the migration. If not: close the issue."
 Bugzilla: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg/issues/56 "Just for tracking
the infrastructure effort, the IWG is not involved in this activity."

Even if these projects are sponsored by the Foundation, and the person
doing the technical work is a Foundation board member, I feel like the
projects ought to be coordinated in public under the auspices of the IWG,
rather than coordinated via private Foundation board meetings. (Otherwise,
what's the point of the IWG?)

And, please note, I totally understand *just how hard and time-consuming* it
is to run one of these migrations, both technically *and* socially. I
really do want to support people who are trying to get infrastructure work
done. And I really would like to encourage the ability to make a decision
in less than 2 years. But, the almost complete lack of communication and
information -- to anyone outside of the Foundation Board -- makes it quite
difficult not to feel frustrated.
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