[cfe-dev] Stand-alone clang builds vs gtest

[Michał Górny via cfe-dev]

Hello, everyone.

I think this is my first posting to the LLVM mailing lists, so I'm
going to shortly introduce myself. My name is Michał Górny;
professionally I'm employed at PathScale, and in my free time I'm
a Gentoo Linux developer. In the latter role, I'm the primary
maintainer for LLVM packages in Gentoo and my main focus at the moment
is bringing them up to the top quality of our packaging standards.

In this, for a long time I had a goal of having fully stand-alone
builds for all LLVM components -- that is, making it possible to build
clang against installed LLVM (with no LLVM sources around), lldb
against installed llvm+clang, etc. Recently the things seem to have
improved a lot, and therefore I'd like to help finishing the task.

From what I can see, clang's build is mostly stand-alone at the moment.
The only thing that seems to be missing are unit tests, that are
relying on gtest being provided from LLVM source tree. Without
the source tree being available, the unit tests are disabled.

I see a few possible ways of solving this, at least as far as Gentoo
packaging is concerned, and I would like to ask which one would be
the most preferred one. The ones I can think of are:

1. Making it possible to override LLVM_MAIN_SRC_DIR. Currently
the directory is obtained from llvm-config, and since Gentoo builds are
done in temporary directories specific to each package in question,
the directory formerly recorded can't be used while building clang.
An easy way out would be to unpack/checkout another copy of LLVM
sources for use in clang, and pass that path to cmake. However,
the disadvantage of this is that we'd end up unpacking quite a lot of
files just for gtest.

2. Making it possible to provide gtest sources separately. Similar to
the previous solution except that it is explicitly noted that we need
only (upstream?) gtest sources. If we're to use upstream gtest sources,
we'd have to copy cmake build files from LLVM. If we go this way, for
consistency we should probably make it possible to use upstream gtest
in LLVM itself as well.

3. Including gtest sources inside clang. This is probably the simplest
solution, however it involves some more code duplication between
multiple LLVM projects.

4. Installing gtest library in a dedicated directory. The LLVM build
system used to install it top-level, and that was wrong. However, I
guess we could live with providing it in a dedicated subdirectory where
it would not collide with any other package.

5. Using system-wide gtest library install. We have a thing like that
in Gentoo, with shared libraries; but I recall upstream calling that
a bad idea, so I don't know if anyone would be interested in using it.

I think I enumerated all the common options I can see. What are your
thoughts?

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>
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