[llvm-dev] Building a program with LLVM on Unix

[David Chisnall via llvm-dev]

On 23 Mar 2016, at 17:45, Russell Wallace via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 
> When you say 'configuring and installing an appropriate version of LLVM and its libraries yourself' - that is indeed what I did on my own machine (Ubuntu 14.04 apt-get thinks 3.4 is latest, so I'm currently building 3.8 from source) - but how would you recommend doing this on a user's machine?

If you’re shipping binaries, statically link.  If you’re not, then it’s the packager’s problem.  In the FreeBSD ports collection, we have every LLVM release from 3.5 onward as a dependency of something.  They can all coexist happily.  If LLVM were a bit better at stable APIs then we wouldn’t have, for example, Mesa only upgrading every few releases and requiring users to have at least two LLVM versions installed.

David