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

[Daniel Dunbar]

Initially I don't actually plan on breaking anything, just removing
the idea that this is something we encourage people to do. So Clang
and your project would keep working.

Longer down the road, if I started changing things I would naturally
be keeping Clang up to date (I don't regard it as "External"), but you
would end up having to make the same changes to your project.

 - Daniel

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 1:56 PM, James Molloy <James.Molloy at arm.com> wrote:
> 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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