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

[Joshua Cranmer]

On 6/21/2012 1:21 PM, Douglas Gregor wrote:
>
> On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:13 PM, Nick Lewycky <nlewycky at google.com 
> <mailto: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. 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.
>
> 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

I decided to try recently to do one of my builds with cmake instead of 
configure. The problem I hit is before I even try compiling in the first 
place: cmake /src/llvm --help produces an extremely useless list of 
options, so it's impossible to figure out how to configure it with cmake 
without looking up online. Compare this to /src/llvm/configure --help, 
where I can see what the default build will look like and also how I can 
tweak it for what I want. Even the online documentation is kind of 
crappy in this regard: e.g., LLVM_TARGETS_TO_BUILD doesn't tell you 
*which* targets you can build in the first place. I'm sure most people 
who do a lot of cmake know these settings by the back of their hand, but 
if you're like me and totally clueless when it comes to cmake, it's 
downright confusing.

-- 
Joshua Cranmer
News submodule owner
DXR coauthor

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