[cfe-dev] [LLVMdev] RFC: Upcoming Build System Changes

[Christopher Jefferson]

On 28 Oct 2011, at 18:26, Daniel Dunbar wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 9:56 AM, Óscar Fuentes <ofv at wanadoo.es> wrote:
>> 
>> You guys are mixing several things on the discussion. What Dan proposed
>> makes no difference for Xcode. If it speeds up the Makefile-based build
>> (something I doubt) that's good, but it is unnecessary for that system
>> to fiddle with the cmake build as long as cmake can deal with the
>> changes on its own.
> 
> My proposal makes it relatively easy for a motivated engineer to
> generate "clean" Xcode projects for LLVM.

Couldn't a similarly motivated engineer work on greatly improving the "clean" Xcode projects for cmake in general?

My personal main experience of a similar system is 'boost::build', or bjam, the build system used for the C++ boost libraries.

This has slowly grown in scope, and I find completely unusable. It makes simple using boost, or configuring it slightly non-standardly, almost impossible without asking on IRC or mailing lists. bjam is the sole reason I have not submitted significant code to boost.

Do not underestimate the benefit of hundreds of webpages written about CMake and make, detailing their nastier features. Where will your system's nastier features be documented?

Sorry to sound negative, but I really don't want to have to learn yet another build system.

One point which I didn't find answered, for casual developers.

I currently do a bit of bug-finding on clang and libc++. All I am interested in is statements around the complexity of:

CXX=g++4-.6 ./configure --prefix=/llvm --enable-expensive-checks; make -j8; make install

Will that change at all?

Chris