[cfe-dev] RFC: "Building with MinGW on Windows" (DOC, 2ND TRY)

[Justin Holewinski]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 6:25 AM, Mikael Lyngvig <mikael at lyngvig.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Here's an updated version of my proposed "Building with MinGW on Windows"
> document.  In summary, the document gives a step-by-step description of how
> to build LLVM + Clang on Windows WITHOUT having Microsoft Visual Studio
> installed.  The high-level goal of the document is to make life pleasant
> for those wonderful Windows users who desire to try out LLVM and/or Clang.
>  I believe the document makes it a piece of cake to get up and running with
> LLVM + Clang on Windows, and that's exactly what I was hoping for.
>
> Changes are many:
>
>     1. The document has been made more slim and now contains less
> chattering.
>     2. The document now uses Ninja instead of MinGW Makefiles.  This
> solves a bunch of problems and also speeds up the build process
> substantially because of the broken "make -j" behavior seen with some or
> all GNU Makes on Windows.
>     3. The document now covers 32-bit and 64-bit builds with MinGW tools
> (if anybody know of an alternate BINARY distribution of MinGW64 than
> Drangon's release, please let me know so I can include it in the document).
>     4. The document now does NOT mention anything about unit tests or test
> suites, etc.  These things will be explained in another document, be it
> through patches to existing documents or through an entirely new document.
>     5. The document is now much smaller because it only introduces what I
> deem to be the essential tools: CMake, Ninja, MinGWnn, Python, and
> Subversion.
>     6. The document now has significantly few chapters and sections in it,
> making the overall experience much less confusing and overwhelming for the
> newbie LLVM and/or Clang user.
>     7. The document no longer mentions my name because I personally prefer
> a documentation strategy where there is no author mentioned in the
> documents.  If this is an unacceptable omission, just let me know, and I'll
> add my name again.
>
> To view the document as it will look on the website, make sure you have
> Sphinx installed and then copy the attached file to llvm/docs, and run
> "make html", after which you'll find the document in
> llvm\docs\_build\html\Building...html.
>
> The document has NOT been linked into the LLVM documentation tree because
> it seems that there is still some uncertainty as to whether this document
> is useful or not.
>
> Any and all comments are greatly appreciated.  I do think, however, that
> it is time that we settle on this being an atomic document that cannot be
> split up further.
>

Generally, I think this looks very good!  A few nit-picks:

   1. You should probably list the somewhat-more-popular mingw64
   distributions available from:  http://mingw-w64.sourceforge.net/
   2. You may want to mention TortoiseSVN as an alternative to SlikSVN, as
   that seems to be a popular choice
   3. As much as I like Ninja, I would add a section on mingw32-make as
   that is the only "official" build choice at the moment ("official" meaning
   supported by CMake developers)

Thanks for working on this!


>
>
> Regards,
> Mikael
> -- Disclaimer: I am *not* arrogant in real life, so if you perceive me as
> being arrogant, you are to blame ;-)
>
>
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>
>


-- 

Thanks,

Justin Holewinski
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