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

[Chandler Carruth]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 9:07 AM, Jordan Rose <jordan_rose at apple.com> wrote:

>
> On Jun 28, 2012, at 6:45 AM, Bill Hoffman wrote:
>
> > On 6/28/2012 8:31 AM, Jean-Daniel Dupas wrote:
> >> My answer was about "CMake developers are aware of the inferior quality
> of the Xcode generator, but they say that there is little interest from the
> Xcode users."
> >
> > I disagree.
> >
> > The CMake devs say that it is the best that can be done with what Xcode
> > can do.  For example in Xcode you can not have a target depend on an
> > arbitrary file.  This makes it impossible to do some of the stuff that
> > CMake needs to do in order to build projects correctly.  To compensate
> > we use custom targets that fall back to makefiles and make called form
> > Xcode.  I don't think we are uninterested.  If there were specific
> > complaints, and examples given in working Xcode projects we would adapt
> > CMake.  The Xcode generator in CMake is able to build all of our test
> > cases and display all of the sources for the project in Xcode.  It does
> > use make for some bits that Xcode can not do.  However, I am not aware
> > of things that are broken.
> >
> > -Bill
>
> I want to stay out of this as a discusser, but I'll offer my current
> experience in Xcode:
>

Thank you for chiming in! This is actionable data that I can use to make
the cmake projects for LLVM and Clang better I suspect.


> One of my machines has a single Xcode project containing both LLVM and
> Clang; the other has two projects contained in a single workspace. The
> latter does not build the Clang regression tests correctly; it is printing
> "PASS" outputs as well as "FAIL" outputs and Xcode is treating these
> messages as failures.
>
> Neither project includes the regression test files by default, even though
> there's a target to run them. I had to add the test directory to my
> workspace manually.
>
> There are files missing from the generated project files: header files and
> tablegen files that live in lib/ instead of include/. There is little point
> in adding these manually to the project because any changes I make are
> overwritten when the projects are regenerated (which happens whenever
> someone touches any CMakeLists file). It would be nice if CMake tried to
> /merge/ project files instead of /replacing/ them, but then again I
> understand the difficulty of working with a closed format.
>
> This is probably a Clang issue more than a CMake issue, but I can't find
> an easy way to only run some tests. Probably I can set TESTDIRS in the
> Build Settings, but I haven't tried it yet. I can't make a separate custom
> target because (again) the whole project file is regenerated, not merged,
> when CMake sees an update.
>

I think all of the points through here are only a problem due to our still
very broken CMake files. I think the system is fine, and we're using it
poorly. Would you care to file one (or a set of) PR(s) and assign them to
me? I'm not sure when I can get to it, but I think I can actually fix all
of these issues with the current system.

The fact that CMake uses make for "some bits that Xcode cannot do" is what
> prevents the Xcode dependency checking from working properly -- the link
> phase of pretty much /every/ target is implemented using make. It would be
> /very/ nice to avoid this.
>

And this is I think great feedback fro the CMake folks. =]
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