[cxx-abi-dev] Administrivia and the future of cxx-abi-dev

[John McCall]

Hello, all.  A couple of announcements, one relatively minor and one more significant.

The Itanium C++ ABI has always been an informal, industry-wide collaboration between various individuals and companies.  That was true in the earliest days of the project, and it's still true today.  I don't think it's slighting anyone to say that, in those early days, CodeSourcery played an extremely central role in developing this ABI.  That is why CodeSourcery hosts this mailing list and why they hosted the original ABI repository.  Over time, as the core ABI issues seemed to settle out and the role of the project became more about keeping up with new progress in the language, and as CodeSourcery encountered new priorities, both as a separate company and eventually as part of Mentor Graphics, they has grown less involved in the project.  So while they did oversee the migration of the repository to GitHub, and while they continue to administer this mailing list, it's quite fair for them to ask whether those are really burdens they should have to bear in perpetuity.

Accordingly, at their request, and acting as the de facto leader of the project, I have created a new itanium-cxx-abi organization on GitHub, and the repository has been transferred there.  Links to the old location should transparently forward to the new canonical URL for the project:
  https://github.com/itanium-cxx-abi/cxx-abi <https://github.com/itanium-cxx-abi/cxx-abi>
I will be making some effort over the next few weeks to improve this website and the organization of the ABI repository itself, so even though the URL above isn't actually very useful right now, it's really the right thing to share.

As for this list, I've discussed it privately with several of the other key contributors, and we've agreed to try using GitHub issues and pull request discussions rather than maintaining a traditional message list or forum.  Almost all of the discussion here is centered around specific new features or bugs, which correspond quite naturally to issues in a traditional issue-tracker.  Cross-cutting efforts and discussions, like the desire to document suggestions for an "ABI v2", can easily be organized into "projects" in the issue tracker or tagged with a dedicated label.  This will also allow us to much more easily track whether suggestions have actually been integrated into the document.

People interesting in watching or participating in ABI discussions can simply watch the repository using GitHub's normal tools for doing so.  Anything that you would normally start a thread about can simply be opened as a new issue (unless it is trivial enough to simply be a pull request).

If there are existing defects you're aware of that haven't yet been integrated into the document (and I know there are many), please go ahead and open GitHub issues for them.  It should be sufficient to include a link to the mailing list archives.

Like I said, we're going to try this out for a while.  I would like any technical discussions hereafter to take place on GitHub.  But if you have any concerns about this process or about the administration of this project, please feel free to respond to this message, either publicly on this list (which isn't going anywhere in the short term) or to me privately.

John.
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