[LLVMdev] [cfe-dev] is configure+make dead yet?

[Nick Lewycky]

On 21/06/2012, Douglas Gregor <dgregor at apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:13 PM, Nick Lewycky <nlewycky at google.com> wrote:
>
>> Is there anybody who is certain that our autoconf dependency needs to stay
>> around? Are there developers stuck on systems that don't have a recent
>> enough cmake in their most recent release, or maybe are using some
>> features from configure+make that the cmake build system doesn't
>> implement?
>>
>> If nobody pipes up, I might actually try actually removing it!
>
> I think this is premature, although I consider it a worthy goal.

I agree, I just had no way of knowing how premature. There was no
list, people aren't in the habit of filing bugs for missing features
and I haven't seen any migration-looking commits landing in a while.

> Right now,
> the only motivation we have for removing "configure+make" is that we don't
> like having two build systems, but that's not good enough.

I want to add support for --compress-debug-sections to the assembler.
That means that I'd like to add a new optional dependency (on zlib) to
llvm, and couldn't. The problem is that I can't run AutoRegen.sh even
after searching for the right versions of all the autoconfy bits.
Debian has a "snapshot" server with every version of every package
they've ever had, and even that failed me; I found autoconf 2.59 and
2.61, but no 2.60.

>From my point of view, that's a crisis. I'm sure we'll figure
something out, but right now I'm thinking "I can't do my job because
of the build system".

> Some things that CMake needs to do well for it to become the only way to
> build LLVM/Clang:
>   - Optionally build and install compiler-rt
>   - Optionally build and install libc++
>   - Ease-to-use cross-compilation support
>   - Documentation to make it easy to understand how to do the above
>   - LLDB?
>   - LLVM testsuite support
>
> And some value-add that might make CMake motivating for others:
>   - Easy bootstrap
>   - Build packages/installers

Thanks for this list!

Nick