Discourse provides a potentially attractive alternative long-form discussions much as currently occur on the LLVM mailing lists. However, we’d like to keep all of these kinds of discussions searchable in a common place, and so we plan to keep a mirror/archive of the mailing lists on Discourse.
Mirroring plan
Initially, we will mirror all emails to the mailing lists under dedicated categories. We’ll have a top-level category for archived emails and a sub-category for each mailing list. These will use the standard process of mirroring mailing lists into Discourse which should create a new topic for each thread.
We’re also working with the Discourse hosting folks to see how we can import an archive of all of the older emails into the mirrored structure so that these mirrors have the full history of the mailing lists as well.
Archiving plan
Long term, if Discourse ends up being a really good solution for the LLVM community and the community would prefer to move away from its ad-hoc mailing lists and primarily use Discourse, we will turn the mirrors into read-only archives so that everything remains searchable and findable in a single location.
At this point, we can also allow selected topics created for a particular thread to be migrated out of the read-only archives and into any other category to be continued normally on Discourse.
Accounts used for mailing list mirror
These should be created automatically based on the sending email address. When that email address doesn’t have a Discourse account, a new “staged” account will be created. You can take over a staged account by creating an account using the same email as created the staged account. See more details about staged accounts here: Description of various user states in Discourse (Admin / Moderator / Staff / Developer / Other) - faq - Discourse Meta