[LLVMdev] RFC/Heads Up: Deprecating External Build Support

[Daniel Dunbar]

Hi all,

I would like to deprecate the LLVM project's "official" support of
setting up the Makefiles / autoconf configurations in such a way that
external projects are encouraged to leverage them in their own build.

I am mostly referring to the things documented in docs/Projects.html
and projects/sample.

My justification:

(1) I believe few people use these capabilities.

(1a) The primary consumer that people have used in the past was
llvm-test-suite. That was broken in its own way, and the test suite
can now be used independently of an LLVM installation. This makes it
much more useful as a production test suite for compilers (vs. a test
suite for a research project).

(2) They are fragile and really not a very good way to structure an
external project. It is much better for external projects to just
structure themselves as any other open source project would and use
tools like llvm-config to gather build information.

(3) The official support is not particularly well known, and is easy
to break. Considering Makefiles and autoconf files as part of a
project API is painful, at best, and makes refactoring of project
structure difficult.

Object now, or hold your peace.

 - Daniel