[LLVMdev] [cfe-dev] RFC: Upcoming Build System Changes

[David Chisnall]

On 28 Oct 2011, at 02:11, Daniel Dunbar wrote:

>   TO BE CLEAR: I intend to introduce a hard dependency on requiring Python in
>   order to build LLVM.
> 
>   For the Makefiles, this is no worse than requiring Perl, so I don't think
>   there is much to argue with.

I disagree there.  Perl is pretty much guaranteed to be installed on any UNIXish system.  Even FreeBSD, which has removed it from the base system, tends to install the Perl package by default.  In contrast, a lot of the machines I use don't have Python installed.  I need to install it if I'm doing LLVM development because it's needed for the tests, but needing it just to build seems like massive overkill.

That said, if the information required for the build is going to be made explicit, maybe this isn't such a problem, as other tools can be written to parse it and run the build.

David