Proposal: Improving the LLVM backend by packaging it

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

On 2014-11-01 at 18:43:35 +0100, Ben Gamari wrote:

[...]

>> This would mostly hurt if you cleaned up the tree later (e.g. 'make
>> distclean'), which I do rather frequently in order to get a pristine
>> build tree.
>>
> Ideally `make clean` would be a bit more complete so it could be used
> more often. Much of my use of `make distclean` comes from superstition
> after thinking `make clean` would be sufficient only to find out
> half-way through the build that there is still vestigal state hanging
> around.

I regularly run ./validate, which by definition has to reset everything
to a zero-state. Moreover, I keep a few GHC source-trees around, and
wouldn't want to have to keep redundant LLVM binaries around. So using
'make clean' isn't an option for everyone. I'd rather install the
required LLVM version system-wide (or rather, reachable via PATH), and
have ./configure try to pick that one up, before deciding it needs to
build its own LLVM.