[PATCH] D108513: [docs] Update Getting Started with Visual Studio guide

Tue Aug 24 04:44:38 PDT 2021

mstorsjo added inline comments.

================
Comment at: llvm/docs/GettingStartedVS.rst:55
-<http://www.python.org/>`_. Version 3.6 and newer are known to work. You will
-need `GnuWin32 <http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/>`_ tools, too.

----------------
aaron.ballman wrote:
> mstorsjo wrote:
> > amccarth wrote:
> > > aaron.ballman wrote:
> > > > I'm a bit worried about losing this information; I didn't have luck skipping GnuWin32 the last time I tried (about a year ago), so I don't think just Python is sufficient. WDYT?
> > > The git-provided versions of common unix tools have been sufficient for me (except there's no make in git).  The git ones are also newer than the GnuWin32 ones, and a couple of them behave slightly differently.
> > > 
> > > The only reason I still I install GnuWin32 is because lldb tests require make.  That said, I make sure that GnuWin32 comes _after_ git in my PATH.  Otherwise, other things go wrong.  GnuWin32 is old and unmaintained.  I don't think we can expect Windows developers to continue to rely on it.
> > > 
> > > I'm not against mentioning it as a possibility, but I don't think it belongs in the mainline "Getting Started" recommendations.
> > Also FYI, regarding GnuWin32 vs the git unix tools - the llvm lit tests also have a provision where they try to locate the git unix tools and add them to the path, but this isn't hooked up when running other testsuites (like for libcxx). See https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/llvm/utils/lit/lit/llvm/config.py#L29-L35.
> If the git tools are sufficient, that's fantastic news (I've been hoping we can get rid of this insecure and long-unsupported requirement for years)! When I last tried, they weren't sufficient; I recall some Clang lit tests were failing because of missing utilities like `sed`. But if you think they're now sufficient, perhaps we should document that more clearly as a need for the testing system? (Also, perhaps the issue is that Git for Windows that comes with VS 2019 may be different from what you download manually, and if so, that would be useful to tell people if it actually matters to the testing system.)
At least the pre-merge test bot runs without GnuWin32 now, but it manually adds the `c:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin` directory to the path instead. The llvm lit config that I linked does look for a path to something similar via the registry, I guess that doesn't find git bundled with Visual Studio (and I'm not sure if that bundled the same unix utilities in the same way).

Repository:
  rG LLVM Github Monorepo

CHANGES SINCE LAST ACTION
  https://reviews.llvm.org/D108513/new/

https://reviews.llvm.org/D108513