[cfe-dev] Best low (no?) prerequisite user-directory install method for Clang/libc++?

[Rocco Moretti via cfe-dev]

Hello,

What is the best method for installing Clang (and the corresponding libc++)
to a user's home directory on a *nix-like OS, with the minimal assumptions
about the state of the rest of the operating system and what's already
installed?

I ask because we want to incorporate C++11 features into our codebase, but
our users often don't have administrative control over the systems they
use. These systems may be computational clusters which were built several
years ago and haven't had major updates since, so the default compilers on
these systems are often old (e.g. gcc 4.4 or even 4.1). Getting the
administrators to install an updated compiler may or may not be feasible.
So as a backup, I'm looking into the possibility of having our users (who
may have very limited *nix experience) install an updated compiler in their
home directory. (Again, on a machine where they don't have administrator
access.)

Is there an easy way to install Clang in a user directory when the system
version of the compiler tool-chain may be very out of date? I noticed the
pre-built binaries on http://llvm.org/releases/download.html, but there's
not much instruction on how to use these, and I'm a little unclear how
"self-contained" these are and if they include the libc++ library.
(Updating the compiler to support C++11 is only minimally helpful if the
standard library used has no C++11 support.)

If possible, I'd like to avoid complex installation procedures, like a
recent experience I had installing Clang 3.7 on Ubuntu 12.04, where in
order to compile Clang from source, it turned out I needed to download and
compile a recent gcc from source first.

At this point we're just looking for C++11 compiler and standard library
support, so the ability to install even a slightly older version of
clang/libc++ (anything since 3.3, as I read things) should help.

Thanks,
-Rocco

P.S. I apologize if this is the wrong mailing list for this -
http://clang.llvm.org/get_involved.html indicated this is the list for
general Clang-related questions.
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