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

[Chris Lattner]

On Oct 11, 2011, at 1:24 PM, Daniel Dunbar wrote:

> 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.

+1.  Please make sure Projects.html is updated, and please add a note to the 3.0 release notes.

-Chris

> 
> 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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