LLVM 3.2: official stable port is still LLVM 3.1. Basesystem missing important LLVM pieces!

[David Chisnall]

On 6 Jan 2013, at 12:55, O. Hartmann wrote:

> Having a crippled LLVM aboard AND the need having installed a port is a
> kind of none-sense. Why should I install port devel/llvm to have a
> working LLVM backend?

The issue is the same as the issue for anything in the FreeBSD base system, which is: what level of compatibility do we want to provide?

In general, we aim to provide a backwards-compatible ABI across an entire major release.  This means that anything that runs on 9.0 should work on 9.1 and so on.  It should also work on 10.x with the relevant compat packages installed.

In contrast, LLVM changes the ABI (and API!) significantly between point releases.  We therefore don't want to encourage anything outside of the base system to link against these libraries, because doing so would prevent us from importing a new LLVM release every six months - we'd either need to ship 4 copies of LLVM by an x.3 release, or stick with the one that we shipped in x.0.

There is no problem with other base-system tools linking against the base system LLVM libraries, but in this case llvm-config does not need to be installed (and neither do the LLVM headers), because such tools will be built as part of the base system itself.

David