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

[James Molloy]

Hi Daniel,

Will Clang be changed to follow this or will it be special-cased? My own python compiler currently uses the same setup Clang does (as you describe), and it works rather well. I'd like to continue to do whatever Clang (or other frontends) do...

Cheers,

James
________________________________________
From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On Behalf Of Daniel Dunbar [daniel at zuster.org]
Sent: 11 October 2011 21:24
To: LLVM Developers Mailing List
Subject: [LLVMdev] RFC/Heads Up: Deprecating External Build Support

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
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