LLVM Seeks New Code Owners

At Chris Lattner's keynote for the LLVM Developers' Conference that took place last week in California, he called for more "code owners" within the LLVM code-base.

LLVM code owners are basically to be like Linux kernel sub-system and driver maintainers within the Linux kernel where they are responsible for the code's well being, documentation, and general point-of-contact for a defined area of the code-base.

The topic of code ownership within LLVM is now being discussed on the LLVM developers' list now that developers are beginning to apply for ownership. A developer from Arxan, a software security company, was first to step up and proposed taping ownership of LLVM's Bitcode as the company has a vested interest in its future. The developer, Joe Abbey, proposed taking over Bitcode ownership in terms of documenting the implementation and responsibility for reviewing patches and code commits. He also wants to take responsibility for the code quality and maintenance.

Chris Lattner already responded in approval of this particular Bitcode owner and he also followed-up to say that he thinks "directory level" ownership is the right granularity.

Questions have now arose and are being discussed over requirements for code ownership, etc. We'll see how it pans all out as the mailing list discussion is still ongoing. These independent code owners might also help to quelch concerns by some individuals that LLVM is too much under the control of Apple.

More information on LLVM developer policies at present are available within the LLVM documentation.