Well, a major downside of not providing alternatives is that installing only llvm-3.2 (say) doesn't make it possible to compile and run 3rd-party LLVM-based software without substantial tweaking. We have modified configure script specially for Ubuntu/Debian to look for llvm-config-3.2 and llvm-config-3.1 in addition to llvm-config. However, we also need to invoke llvm-link and possibly other llvm binaries at runtime, and this is a lot trickier. It seems silly to write special hacks just to make things work out of the box on Debian/Ubuntu.
Please, just provide alternatives. There're no real reasons to not use them, besides "I don't want to". For most users, installing llvm-3.2 and actually getting llvm-3.2 that works out of the box would be quite useful, I reckon.
To quote from http://wiki.debian.org/DebianAlternatives: The Debian alternatives system creates a way for several programs that fulfill the same or similar functions to be listed as alternative implementations that are installed simultaneously but with one particular implementation designated as the default.
Well, a major downside of not providing alternatives is that installing only llvm-3.2 (say) doesn't make it possible to compile and run 3rd-party LLVM-based software without substantial tweaking. We have modified configure script specially for Ubuntu/Debian to look for llvm-config-3.2 and llvm-config-3.1 in addition to llvm-config. However, we also need to invoke llvm-link and possibly other llvm binaries at runtime, and this is a lot trickier. It seems silly to write special hacks just to make things work out of the box on Debian/Ubuntu.
Please, just provide alternatives. There're no real reasons to not use them, besides "I don't want to". For most users, installing llvm-3.2 and actually getting llvm-3.2 that works out of the box would be quite useful, I reckon.
To quote from http:// wiki.debian. org/DebianAlter natives: The Debian alternatives system creates a way for several programs that fulfill the same or similar functions to be listed as alternative implementations that are installed simultaneously but with one particular implementation designated as the default.