[LLVMdev] RFC: "Building with MinGW on Windows" (DOC, 2ND TRY)

Mikael Lyngvig
Mon, 18 Jun 2012 10:25:08 -0000

Hi all,

Here's an updated version of my proposed "Building with MinGW on
Windows"
document.  In summary, the document gives a step-by-step description of how
to build LLVM + Clang on Windows WITHOUT having Microsoft Visual Studio
installed.  The high-level goal of the document is to make life pleasant
for those wonderful Windows users who desire to try out LLVM and/or Clang.
 I believe the document makes it a piece of cake to get up and running with
LLVM + Clang on Windows, and that's exactly what I was hoping for.

Changes are many:

    1. The document has been made more slim and now contains less
chattering.
    2. The document now uses Ninja instead of MinGW Makefiles.  This solves
a bunch of problems and also speeds up the build process substantially
because of the broken "make -j" behavior seen with some or all GNU
Makes on
Windows.
    3. The document now covers 32-bit and 64-bit builds with MinGW tools
(if anybody know of an alternate BINARY distribution of MinGW64 than
Drangon's release, please let me know so I can include it in the document).
    4. The document now does NOT mention anything about unit tests or test
suites, etc.  These things will be explained in another document, be it
through patches to existing documents or through an entirely new document.
    5. The document is now much smaller because it only introduces what I
deem to be the essential tools: CMake, Ninja, MinGWnn, Python, and
Subversion.
    6. The document now has significantly few chapters and sections in it,
making the overall experience much less confusing and overwhelming for the
newbie LLVM and/or Clang user.
    7. The document no longer mentions my name because I personally prefer
a documentation strategy where there is no author mentioned in the
documents.  If this is an unacceptable omission, just let me know, and I'll
add my name again.

To view the document as it will look on the website, make sure you have
Sphinx installed and then copy the attached file to llvm/docs, and run
"make html", after which you'll find the document in
llvm\docs\_build\html\Building...html.

The document has NOT been linked into the LLVM documentation tree because
it seems that there is still some uncertainty as to whether this document
is useful or not.

Any and all comments are greatly appreciated.  I do think, however, that it
is time that we settle on this being an atomic document that cannot be
split up further.


Regards,
Mikael
-- Disclaimer: I am *not* arrogant in real life, so if you perceive me as
being arrogant, you are to blame ;-)
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