On 3 June 2016 at 18:47, Rui Ueyama <ruiu@google.com> wrote:
> Renato, it is not appropriate to call it my and Rafael's pet project.

Hi Rui,

I apologise, that was wrong in all levels.

I know how much other people have contributed, but these people are on
the inside already, so their contributions are more easily accepted.

We have been trying to contribute for more than a year and have yet
failed to get in the loop. We were asked to wait for 2 years until the
core linker was ready, we did. Last year we wasted 3 months on the old
back end, and were told to wait again. Now we wasted another 4 months
this year, and all we did was re-written without warning. I cannot
recommend Linaro to continue wasting any more time.


> I have never declined contributions by saying that "I know better." I
> requested design documents (because I don't know better!) when contributors
> seem to be starting large design changes, but that was needed for
> discussion. If you want to do some large change, you want to convince other
> collaborators that your design will work. It is I think a usual process.

Again, I apologise. Your behaviour is by no means comparable to Rafael's.

But he's taking the stance and speaking for the LLD community, at
least that's what it looks like to me.

Linaro is not a drive-by contributor to LLVM, or even to LLD. And if
even long time contributors to LLVM, and professional developers with
decades of experience in linker technology, are getting this
treatment, what does that say about others?


> I sincerely request you to retract your recommendation to not collaborate
> with us.

Those are based on facts. Not about you, but about interacting the the
LLD community, which unfortunately, you're part of.

I don't want to blame people, I want to produce software, and the LLD
community is blocking our progress for 3 years already.


> I had totally no intention to say that you should try something outside LLD. I'm sorry for the confusion.

That's what I meant, yes. :)

Let me re-write my question to make sure we get over the language barrier:

Is the LLD community in agreement that a few core developers can and
will continue to block contributions, while doing all the work
themselves until such a day that it's deemed ready by the same
developers, in which time that everyone else will then, be allowed to
collaborate?

Or is the community in disagreement with Rafael's behaviour and will
try to not only curb it, but openly and actively promote more
collaboration by allowing other people to participate in the design
and implementation of their own targets?

If the former, than I'll respectfully move to MCLinker. If the latter,
than I expect due process and future collaborations, including letting
Adhemerval complete the AArch64 TLS implementation with proper code
review, not bypass re-writes.

As I said earlier, we'll continue to collaborate on LLD for the time
being on both ARM and AArch64 targets, and the next months will be a
test of how the LLD community will respond to this incident.

Peter Smith has just sent an initial implementation for the ARM target
(D20951), and he's working on improving it to be able to self-host
Clang on ARM in the next few months. I seriously hope that this
doesn't end up as another bad decision.

cheers,
--renato