[LLVMdev] Howdy + GIT

[David Chisnall]

On 15 Jan 2015, at 18:41, Reid Spencer <reid at reactific.com> wrote:
> 
>  I think smaller repositories make LLVM seem less formidable and should encourage further adoption and contribution. 

How many *libraries* do you use where your first step on looking at the library was to look in and judge its repository, rather than reading documentation?  If I want to use a library, I ask my package manager to install the package for it and I look at API docs (and, ideally, tutorials).  I do not know or care what the structure of its code is, until I want to contribute to it, and I don't want to contribute to a library until I've been using it for a while.  If I ask my package manager to install libfoobar, and then a few months later an update replaces it with a completely incompatible libfoobar, then I become frustrated.  That puts me off contributing to libfoobar long before I ever even look at its repository.

As a user of LLVM, I mostly want a libLLVM.so that I can link against and use.  Big shared libraries don't bother me (unless they're running a load of constructors), because they're shared and only the bits I need are going to be paged in.  One big monolithic library (as a build product, irrespective of the code layout) is more convenient because I don't need complex pkg-config scripts in my build system to work out which subset of a tightly-connected tangle I'm using.

David