[LLVMdev] The system library is gone for a long time.

[Sean Silva]

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 7:36 PM, Rafael Espíndola <
rafael.espindola at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Ah, ok. In that case, I think that it would be best to make a new page
> for
> > libSupport, and have it defer to SystemLibrary.rst for discussion of the
> > "libSystem" parts of libSupport. The major necessary changes for
> > SystemLibrary.rst would then be to mention its inclusion in libSupport
> > (important) and fix file paths (mechanical, less important).
>
> Sorry, but at least for me having a docs/SystemLibrary.rst and so
> lib/System is very confusing.


As I mentioned, for the moment the page should (probably in its first
sentence) mention that the code has been merged into libSupport and that it
doesn't exist in the tree as lib/System. Simply replacing "System" with
"Support" doesn't really buy anything, besides misrepresenting what
libSupport actually is (consider the second sentence of <
http://llvm.org/docs/SystemLibrary.html> (describing the purpose), which is
not accurate about libSupport as a whole).



> Ideally we would have a
> docs/SystemLibrary.rst that would just says "this library has been
> merged to lib/Support" and docs/SupportLibrary.rst documents whatever
> is in lib/Support.
>

Considering our OS portability layer to be it's own separate thing, even if
it isn't its own lib/* directory is probably a good distinction to make
regardless. And SystemLibrary.rst is well-written and has excellent,
focused content about LLVM's approach to OS portability.

After thinking about this a bit more, it's not clear to me that it would be
beneficial to include this content into a general page about libSupport, as
that would make it less focused and harder to find. If anything, it would
be "ideal" to put it into a file Portability.rst (or similar), but that's a
marginal benefit anyway since it is already one of the top hits when
searching "llvm portability". We can really easily massage the title and
content (such as referenced file paths), like what happended to
clang/docs/Tooling.rst, which is now "Choosing the Right Interface for Your
Application" <http://clang.llvm.org/docs/Tooling.html>.

-- Sean Silva
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