Why not provide libclang.so in base?

[Dimitry Andric]

On 2012-07-18 14:54, Yanhui Shen wrote:
> I'm using clang-complete plugin in vim,
> it claims with libclang.so instead of bin/clang it works better.
> 
> However libclang.so is not installed by a default "make buildworld && make
> installworld",
> even with 'WITH_CLANG_EXTRAS="YES"' in src.conf.

This is because it would add quite a lot of build overhead to produce
that .so file: all the object files will need to be recompiled yet again
for shared library support.

That said, we will probably want to provide at least a shared LLVM lib
in the future, since it can be re-used by other programs.  When that
happens, it would not be too much extra work to provide a shared Clang
library.


> I have to install lang/clang *again* from ports to acquire the
> "libclang.so".

Most of the time, people will not need this functionality in base, which
is why it is in a port.  The same applies if you want the latest
version, or if you want to build with any specialized options.


> So why not provide "libclang.so" in base directly?
> I think if it's not a general component, provide a flag something like
> "WITH_LIBCLANG=YES" is also fine.

It needs to be figured out properly, which costs time and effort.  Both
of which are currently in short supply, at least for me... :-/