As discussed in the mailing list [1-4], we need a separation of support
tiers when requiring support from the whole community versus a
sub-community. Essentially, if a sub-community is active enough and
takes maintenance into their own internal costs without affecting other
parts of the community's maintenance costs, then code that is not
immediately relevant to all parts (ie. not released, actively tested,
etc) can still find its way into the LLVM main repository without major
pain points.
The main benefit is to reduce the maintenance cost that those
sub-communities have outside of LLVM (for example, in duplicating common
code, applying the same patches on top of multiple user repositories or
downstream projects).
This document outlines the components and responsibilities of the
sub-communities with regards to maintenance costs and how they affect
the rest of the community.
It also adds an addendum on removal policies, which expand the existing
"new target removal" policy into something more generic, to encompass
any piece of code, scripts or documents in the repository.
[1] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-October/146249.html
[2] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-November/146335.html
[3] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-October/146138.html
[4] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-November/146298.html
