[cfe-dev] [LLVMdev] is configure+make dead yet?

[Douglas Gregor]

On Jun 21, 2012, at 11:40 AM, Chandler Carruth <chandlerc at google.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 10:21 AM, Douglas Gregor <dgregor at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:13 PM, Nick Lewycky <nlewycky at google.com> wrote:
> 
>> Is there anybody who is certain that our autoconf dependency needs to stay around? Are there developers stuck on systems that don't have a recent enough cmake in their most recent release, or maybe are using some features from configure+make that the cmake build system doesn't implement?
>> 
>> If nobody pipes up, I might actually try actually removing it!
> 
> I think this is premature, although I consider it a worthy goal. Right now, the only motivation we have for removing "configure+make" is that we don't like having two build systems, but that's not good enough.
> 
> Here here. Thanks for writing up this detailed and accurate response.
>  
> Some things that CMake needs to do well for it to become the only way to build LLVM/Clang:
>   - Optionally build and install compiler-rt 
>   - Optionally build and install libc++
> 
> FYI, I'm currently in-flight working on the first of these, and planning to work on the second afterward.

Great!

>   - Ease-to-use cross-compilation support
>   - Documentation to make it easy to understand how to do the above
>   - LLDB?
>   - LLVM testsuite support
> 
> I think David might be interested in this. However, the way LNT is structured, I don't think this is a requisite: it is now much more common to build the testsuite independently of llvm/clang, and hand it a set of pre-built binaries.

Okay, that's reasonable.

> And some value-add that might make CMake motivating for others:
>   - Easy bootstrap
>   - Build packages/installers
> 
> A couple more:
> 
> - Support for ninja if you happen to have it (and no cost if you don't) gives you faster rebuilds.
> - Slightly better support for the new Tooling infrastructure.

Your Tooling comment brings up a more general thing. One way CMake could be more motivating is if it made it *easy* to create new Clang tools (based on tooling), Clang plugins (when they come along), and also LLVM tools.

	- Doug

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