Proposal: Improving the LLVM backend by packaging it

[Ben Gamari]

Austin Seipp <austin at well-typed.com> writes:

> On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 10:43 AM, Ben Gamari <bgamari.foss at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'm certainly not opposed to this idea and there is precedent in this
>> area set by the Rust folks. That being said, I suspect some
>> distributions may care pretty deeply about being able to compile against
>> their own LLVM packaging, especially if they are already shipping the
>> same LLVM version as we require. It would be really nice to hear your
>> thoughts on this, Joachim.
>
> Yes, this is a worry of mine too.
>
>> Do you envision that LLVM always be built alongside GHC when bringing
>> up a new working tree?
>
> No - on Tier 1 platforms, I suggest we always provide binary packages
> for developers to grab. Those same binaries would be shipped with the
> actual binary distributions we create.
>
Good. That would greatly improve the ease-of-building. That being said,
we'll also need to have logic in the build system to build LLVM from
source as the Debian packaging guidelines prohibit the packaging rules
From downloading binaries, IIRC. Unfortunately my cursory look didn't
turn up any language in the packaging policy[1] to support this.

> On Tier 2 platforms, people may have to compile things, but we can
> provide some guidelines (and perhaps utilities/scripts) to help manage
> this.
>
Good, I suppose the Debian packaging could just use these.

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#s-standardsversion

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