[RFC] Proposing a new lead maintainer for LLVM

LLVM Project
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We’ve recently updated the developer policy regarding maintainership, so now’s a good time to start updating the specific lists of folks volunteering for those roles. LLVM is one of the most critical parts of the overall project and its list of code owners has been outdated for some time now. Chris Lattner (@clattner) has done a wonderful job in the “everything not covered by someone else” role since LLVM’s inception, but I believe his bandwidth has diminished over the years and now is the right time for a new leader to step up and help drive a full refresh of LLVM’s list of maintainers.

To that end, I would like to nominate Nikita Popov (@nikic) to be the lead maintainer for the LLVM subproject. Nikita has been a long-time, active contributor to LLVM, has deep technical knowledge across many of the components, performs quality reviews, knows many of the other maintainers within the project, runs key community services like https://llvm-compile-time-tracker.com/, and has largely already been doing the work we expect of a lead maintainer.

Further, I would like to nominate Chris Lattner to be an emeritus lead maintainer for LLVM, similar to how we’ve transitioned Doug Gregor and Richard Smith as Clang’s former leads. The importance of Chris’ contributions to the community cannot be overstated – we wouldn’t be here were it not for Chris’ efforts. Thank you for all the years of effort and leadership!

51 Likes
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Nikita’s knowledge and thorough code reviews have been necessary for LLVM to be in the state it’s in right now. I really appreciate the time and effort Nikita puts into LLVM, so +1 to this RFC

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I support this nomination! Nikita is knowledgeable and has been instrumental to get releases out of the door as long as I have been involved with them!

I would also like to thank Chris for all the hard work he has done and continue to do for LLVM! It wouldn’t be where it is today without his good work!

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+1 Nikita is doing a great job.

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Thanks for taking the lead to refresh the code owner concept and making this proposal. I support this nomination as well!

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+1 I think Nikita is a logical choice.

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+1. Nikita is very responsive, and is always prompt to review code, in my experience. Moreover, Nikita is highly neutral, and doesn’t have vested interests.

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Support! Nikic give me great advice for test case.

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It’s hard to imagine someone better suited for the position than Nikita, TBH. +1 to everyone’s sentiments about both Chris and Nikita. Thanks for making this project so nice to work on, and being so pleasant to work with.

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+1

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+1. I always get quality reviews from Nikita.

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+1

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+1, I fully support this transition, thank you for everything you’re contributing to LLVM Nikita!

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+1 as well!

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Thank you for the nomination @AaronBallman, and thanks everyone for your support! I’m happy to take up the lead maintainer role.

In terms of “implementing” this change, I’d like to first move LLVM’s existing code owner list to the new Maintainers.rst format ([LLVM][Maintainers] Move code owner list to Maintainers.rst by nikic · Pull Request #110240 · llvm/llvm-project · GitHub). Once that lands, I’ll submit the PR to update the lead maintainer, and start working on getting the rest of the list up to date.

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To close the loop here, the PR to update the lead maintainer is now up at [LLVM][Maintainers] Update lead maintainer for LLVM by nikic · Pull Request #111180 · llvm/llvm-project · GitHub.

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Thank you for closing the loop while I was out for WG14 meetings!