[LLVMdev] Optional Target Builds

[Misha Brukman]

On Fri, Apr 22, 2005 at 08:54:07AM -0700, Reid Spencer wrote:
> There has been some debate about the default value. I tend to agree
> with Chris on this. The default should be "all" so that everything
> gets tested by default. More sophisticated users can limit the targets
> that are built by merely typing -enable-targets=host on the configure
> line; not a big deal in my books.

I would claim that from a user's perspective, default should be a
compiler that generates code for the host platform, and nothing else.
As we gather more and more backends, the "default" compilation will take
longer and longer.

A developer who wishes to make sure none of his changes break other
targets and the nightly tester should run with `--enable-targets=all',
but it doesn't make sense (to me) to make it the default.

> One other problem with making the default build only one or some of
> the targets is that it will (currently) cause the dejagnu tests to
> fail because llc won't know about certain targets that are in the test
> suite. 

That will have to be changed regardless of what setting is chosen for
the --enable-targets default, because if a user compiles only a small
set of targets, it doesn't make sense for the test suite to report a lot
of errors for targets the user isn't even remotely interested in.

-- 
Misha Brukman :: http://misha.brukman.net :: http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu