I would like to start pushing back on this already. There is basically no chance this deadline will work in practice for Clang. For example, I have several long-running patches under review in Phabricator, such as:
⚙ D140828 [C++] Implement "Deducing this" (P0847R7) (started Jan 1, 2023)
https://reviews.llvm.org/D133289 (started Sept 5, 2022)
(and others). These patches are still being actively worked on and reviewed, so it’s not stale work. I’m working as quickly as I can to drain my phabricator review queue, but between the ongoing 17.x release and upcoming conference talks/standards meetings, there’s no way Oct 1 is something I can meet. Further, it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to try to split these kinds of complex reviews across both Phab and GitHub, so I’m left wondering what can be done.
One possible solution could be to put Phab into a mode where new reviews cannot be initiated in Phab, but comments and uploading new revisions of existing reviews are still allowed, then leave phab up and hobbling until we’re ready to shut the service down in Oct 2024. I have no idea how feasible that is, though.
Tangentially, there’s a problem that’s become more obvious to me in the past week: resurrecting old patches is a thing people still regularly do:
https://reviews.llvm.org/D154716#4636803
https://reviews.llvm.org/D141192#4638188
https://reviews.llvm.org/D92733#4638319
https://reviews.llvm.org/D92790#4638635
(and that’s just the ones I noticed this week!) Putting Phab into read only mode makes that quite a bit harder – currently, our best hope of reaching authors is on the patch itself. Obviously, we cannot leave Phab up and running forever – so this is more a request for us to think about and document some best practices for how to revive old reviews. So far, the only thing I can come up with is to try to find them on Discourse and failing that, try to scrape their email address out of the review email that goes to the commits list to email them privately. That said, IMO, there’s no reason to presume anyone is reachable on Discourse or that contributors are going to be comfortable privately emailing strangers instead of asking on a public thread where others can chime in to help, so hopefully someone has some better ideas that are more new-contributor-friendly. Leaving Phab in a “comment only” mode could help in the short-term though.