As discussed in the mailing list [1-4], we need a separation of support
tiers when requiring support from the whole community versus a
sub-community. Essentially, if a sub-community is active enough and
takes maintenance into their own internal costs without affecting other
parts of the community's maintenance costs, then code that is not
immediately relevant to all parts (ie. not released, actively tested,
etc) can still find its way into the LLVM main repository without major
pain points.
The main benefit is to reduce the maintenance cost that those
sub-communities have outside of LLVM (for example, in duplicating common
code, applying the same patches on top of multiple user repositories or
downstream projects).
This document outlines the components and responsibilities of the
sub-communities with regards to maintenance costs and how they affect
the rest of the community.
It also adds an addendum on removal policies, which expand the existing
"new target removal" policy into something more generic, to encompass
any piece of code, scripts or documents in the repository.
[1] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-October/146249.html
[2] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-November/146335.html
[3] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-October/146138.html
[4] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-November/146298.html
LLVM Documentation
==================
LLVM's documentation is written in reStructuredText, a lightweight
plaintext markup language (file extension `.rst`). While the
reStructuredText documentation should be quite readable in source form, it
is mostly meant to be processed by the Sphinx documentation generation
system to create HTML pages which are hosted on <https://llvm.org/docs/> and
updated after every commit. Manpage output is also supported, see below.
If you instead would like to generate and view the HTML locally, install
Sphinx <http://sphinx-doc.org/> and then do:
cd <build-dir>
cmake -DLLVM_ENABLE_SPHINX=true -DSPHINX_OUTPUT_HTML=true <src-dir>
make -j3 docs-llvm-html
$BROWSER <build-dir>/docs//html/index.html
The mapping between reStructuredText files and generated documentation is
`docs/Foo.rst` <-> `<build-dir>/docs//html/Foo.html` <-> `https://llvm.org/docs/Foo.html`.
If you are interested in writing new documentation, you will want to read
`SphinxQuickstartTemplate.rst` which will get you writing documentation
very fast and includes examples of the most important reStructuredText
markup syntax.
Manpage Output
===============
Building the manpages is similar to building the HTML documentation. The
primary difference is to use the `man` makefile target, instead of the
default (which is `html`). Sphinx then produces the man pages in the
directory `<build-dir>/docs/man/`.
cd <build-dir>
cmake -DLLVM_ENABLE_SPHINX=true -DSPHINX_OUTPUT_MAN=true <src-dir>
make -j3 docs-llvm-man
man -l >build-dir>/docs/man/FileCheck.1
The correspondence between .rst files and man pages is
`docs/CommandGuide/Foo.rst` <-> `<build-dir>/docs//man/Foo.1`.
These .rst files are also included during HTML generation so they are also
viewable online (as noted above) at e.g.
`https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/Foo.html`.
Checking links
==============
The reachability of external links in the documentation can be checked by
running:
cd docs/
make -f Makefile.sphinx linkcheck
Doxygen page Output
==============
Install doxygen <http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/download.html> and dot2tex <https://dot2tex.readthedocs.io/en/latest>.
cd <build-dir>
cmake -DLLVM_ENABLE_DOXYGEN=On <llvm-top-src-dir>
make doxygen-llvm # for LLVM docs
make doxygen-clang # for clang docs
It will generate html in
<build-dir>/docs/doxygen/html # for LLVM docs
<build-dir>/tools/clang/docs/doxygen/html # for clang docs