[LLVMdev] Deprecating autoconf/make?

[Bob Wilson]

On May 22, 2013, at 4:14 PM, Eric Christopher <echristo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> I fear starting another centi-thread on this but I'll give it a shot.
> 
> We're currently supporting two build systems which is definitely one
> more than we (or I) want to support.
> 
> I don't know of any support in autoconf past the
> --host/--build/--target case that's not supported in cmake. I'll send
> out an assertion here that this support isn't necessary and any system
> that needs it can instead move to:
> 
> build native clang
> build next clang with some target that supplies a sysroot and a
> -target option to the native clang
> 
> Can anyone see good a reason not to move to cmake as our only build
> configuration system and drop future support for autoconf + makefiles
> now that 3.3 has branched?

Apple needs to continue supporting various cross-builds, and while I believe you that it could be done as you suggest, it would take a bit of work to get it right for all the different ways we build clang and llvm.  I haven't seen the maintenance of configure+make to be a significant burden.  Yes, it's kind of gross to have two build systems, and it can be annoying to keep them both working, but I would much rather keep the configure+make system working so that we can invest our efforts in actually making llvm a better compiler.