#847 Request to have guidance on growing use of LLVM
Closed None Opened 11 years ago by jcm.

= phenomenon =

The secondary toolchain LLVM is growing in popularity. While this represents a good technology advance, Fedora is heavily invested (in staffing, experience) with GCC. It is my belief (and I believe that of others) that there is not room in Fedora for two fundamental toolchains without appropriate staffing and resources (which do not exist for LLVM). These things have a tendency to creep in as dependencies unless a firm policy or expectation is set. Therefore, I hereby request that FESCo provide guidance as to the acceptable uses of LLVM. Ideally it would be explicitly stated that it cannot be required for critpath beyond any deps that might already have been created, without explicit approval.

If you do not act on this, I fear we will look back in a few years with growing dependency on tooling for which we do not have sufficient engineers to provide the level of technical support and development that exist with e.g. GCC today. I am not against LLVM. I like the technology, but adoption of such things should be carefully planned and co-ordinated, not creep in slowly over time because nobody said anything to stop it.


Adding meeting keyword.

At the 2012-05-14 FESCo meeting, the following policy decision was made: "Packages may only build with an alternative compiler to gcc if upstream does not support gcc" (6 +1)

FPC ticket https://fedorahosted.org/fpc/ticket/173 was opened to process a draft for the Packaging Guidelines.

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