This is cleaning up comments (mostly in the bitcode handling) about
removing some backward compatibility aspect in the 4.0 release.
Historically, "4.0" was used during the development of the 3.x
versions as "this future major breaking change version". At the time
the major number was used to indicate the compatibility. When we
reached 3.9 we decided to change the numbering, instead of going to
3.10 we went to 4.0 but after changing the meaning of the major
number to not mean anything anymore with respect to bitcode backward
compatibility.
The current policy
(https://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#ir-backwards-compatibility)
indicates only now:
The current LLVM version supports loading any bitcode since version 3.0.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D82514
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