This document contains the LLVM Developer Policy which defines the project’s policy towards developers and their contributions. The intent of this policy is to eliminate miscommunication, rework, and confusion that might arise from the distributed nature of LLVM’s development. By stating the policy in clear terms, we hope each developer can know ahead of time what to expect when making LLVM contributions. This policy covers all llvm.org subprojects, including Clang, LLDB, libc++, etc.
This policy is also designed to accomplish the following objectives:
This policy is aimed at frequent contributors to LLVM. People interested in contributing one-off patches can do so in an informal way by sending them to the llvm-commits mailing list and engaging another developer to see it through the process.
This section contains policies that pertain to frequent LLVM developers. We always welcome one-off patches from people who do not routinely contribute to LLVM, but we expect more from frequent contributors to keep the system as efficient as possible for everyone. Frequent LLVM contributors are expected to meet the following requirements in order for LLVM to maintain a high standard of quality.
Developers should stay informed by reading at least the “dev” mailing list for the projects you are interested in, such as llvm-dev for LLVM, cfe-dev for Clang, or lldb-dev for LLDB. If you are doing anything more than just casual work on LLVM, it is suggested that you also subscribe to the “commits” mailing list for the subproject you’re interested in, such as llvm-commits, cfe-commits, or lldb-commits. Reading the “commits” list and paying attention to changes being made by others is a good way to see what other people are interested in and watching the flow of the project as a whole.
We recommend that active developers register an email account with LLVM Bugzilla and preferably subscribe to the llvm-bugs email list to keep track of bugs and enhancements occurring in LLVM. We really appreciate people who are proactive at catching incoming bugs in their components and dealing with them promptly.
Please be aware that all public LLVM mailing lists are public and archived, and that notices of confidentiality or non-disclosure cannot be respected.
When making a patch for review, the goal is to make it as easy for the reviewer to read it as possible. As such, we recommend that you:
Once your patch is ready, submit it by emailing it to the appropriate project’s commit mailing list (or commit it directly if applicable). Alternatively, some patches get sent to the project’s development list or component of the LLVM bug tracker, but the commit list is the primary place for reviews and should generally be preferred.
When sending a patch to a mailing list, it is a good idea to send it as an attachment to the message, not embedded into the text of the message. This ensures that your mailer will not mangle the patch when it sends it (e.g. by making whitespace changes or by wrapping lines).
For Thunderbird users: Before submitting a patch, please open Preferences > Advanced > General > Config Editor, find the key mail.content_disposition_type, and set its value to 1. Without this setting, Thunderbird sends your attachment using Content-Disposition: inline rather than Content-Disposition: attachment. Apple Mail gamely displays such a file inline, making it difficult to work with for reviewers using that program.
When submitting patches, please do not add confidentiality or non-disclosure notices to the patches themselves. These notices conflict with the LLVM License and may result in your contribution being excluded.
LLVM has a code review policy. Code review is one way to increase the quality of software. We generally follow these policies:
Sometimes code reviews will take longer than you would hope for, especially for larger features. Accepted ways to speed up review times for your patches are:
Developers should participate in code reviews as both reviewers and reviewees. If someone is kind enough to review your code, you should return the favor for someone else. Note that anyone is welcome to review and give feedback on a patch, but only people with Subversion write access can approve it.
There is a web based code review tool that can optionally be used for code reviews. See Code Reviews with Phabricator.
The LLVM Project relies on two features of its process to maintain rapid development in addition to the high quality of its source base: the combination of code review plus post-commit review for trusted maintainers. Having both is a great way for the project to take advantage of the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time, and only commit patches without pre-commit review when they are confident they are right.
The trick to this is that the project has to guarantee that all patches that are committed are reviewed after they go in: you don’t want everyone to assume someone else will review it, allowing the patch to go unreviewed. To solve this problem, we have a notion of an ‘owner’ for a piece of the code. The sole responsibility of a code owner is to ensure that a commit to their area of the code is appropriately reviewed, either by themself or by someone else. The list of current code owners can be found in the file CODE_OWNERS.TXT in the root of the LLVM source tree.
Note that code ownership is completely different than reviewers: anyone can review a piece of code, and we welcome code review from anyone who is interested. Code owners are the “last line of defense” to guarantee that all patches that are committed are actually reviewed.
Being a code owner is a somewhat unglamorous position, but it is incredibly important for the ongoing success of the project. Because people get busy, interests change, and unexpected things happen, code ownership is purely opt-in, and anyone can choose to resign their “title” at any time. For now, we do not have an official policy on how one gets elected to be a code owner.
Developers are required to create test cases for any bugs fixed and any new features added. Some tips for getting your testcase approved:
Note that llvm/test and clang/test are designed for regression and small feature tests only. More extensive test cases (e.g., entire applications, benchmarks, etc) should be added to the llvm-test test suite. The llvm-test suite is for coverage (correctness, performance, etc) testing, not feature or regression testing.
The minimum quality standards that any change must satisfy before being committed to the main development branch are:
Additionally, the committer is responsible for addressing any problems found in the future that the change is responsible for. For example:
We prefer for this to be handled before submission but understand that it isn’t possible to test all of this for every submission. Our build bots and nightly testing infrastructure normally finds these problems. A good rule of thumb is to check the nightly testers for regressions the day after your change. Build bots will directly email you if a group of commits that included yours caused a failure. You are expected to check the build bot messages to see if they are your fault and, if so, fix the breakage.
Commits that violate these quality standards (e.g. are very broken) may be reverted. This is necessary when the change blocks other developers from making progress. The developer is welcome to re-commit the change after the problem has been fixed.
Although we don’t enforce the format of commit messages, we prefer that you follow these guidelines to help review, search in logs, email formatting and so on. These guidelines are very similar to rules used by other open source projects.
Most importantly, the contents of the message should be carefully written to convey the rationale of the change (without delving too much in detail). It also should avoid being vague or overly specific. For example, “bits were not set right” will leave the reviewer wondering about which bits, and why they weren’t right, while “Correctly set overflow bits in TargetInfo” conveys almost all there is to the change.
Below are some guidelines about the format of the message itself:
For minor violations of these recommendations, the community normally favors reminding the contributor of this policy over reverting. Minor corrections and omissions can be handled by sending a reply to the commits mailing list.
We grant commit access to contributors with a track record of submitting high quality patches. If you would like commit access, please send an email to Chris with the following information:
Once you’ve been granted commit access, you should be able to check out an LLVM tree with an SVN URL of “https://username@llvm.org/...” instead of the normal anonymous URL of “http://llvm.org/...”. The first time you commit you’ll have to type in your password. Note that you may get a warning from SVN about an untrusted key; you can ignore this. To verify that your commit access works, please do a test commit (e.g. change a comment or add a blank line). Your first commit to a repository may require the autogenerated email to be approved by a mailing list. This is normal and will be done when the mailing list owner has time.
If you have recently been granted commit access, these policies apply:
In any case, your changes are still subject to code review (either before or after they are committed, depending on the nature of the change). You are encouraged to review other peoples’ patches as well, but you aren’t required to do so.
When a developer begins a major new project with the aim of contributing it back to LLVM, they should inform the community with an email to the llvm-dev email list, to the extent possible. The reason for this is to:
The design of LLVM is carefully controlled to ensure that all the pieces fit together well and are as consistent as possible. If you plan to make a major change to the way LLVM works or want to add a major new extension, it is a good idea to get consensus with the development community before you start working on it.
Once the design of the new feature is finalized, the work itself should be done as a series of incremental changes, not as a long-term development branch.
In the LLVM project, we do all significant changes as a series of incremental patches. We have a strong dislike for huge changes or long-term development branches. Long-term development branches have a number of drawbacks:
To address these problems, LLVM uses an incremental development style and we require contributors to follow this practice when making a large/invasive change. Some tips:
If you are interested in making a large change, and this scares you, please make sure to first discuss the change/gather consensus then ask about the best way to go about making the change.
When contributors submit a patch to an LLVM project, other developers with commit access may commit it for the author once appropriate (based on the progression of code review, etc.). When doing so, it is important to retain correct attribution of contributions to their contributors. However, we do not want the source code to be littered with random attributions “this code written by J. Random Hacker” (this is noisy and distracting). In practice, the revision control system keeps a perfect history of who changed what, and the CREDITS.txt file describes higher-level contributions. If you commit a patch for someone else, please follow the attribution of changes in the simple manner as outlined by the commit messages section. Overall, please do not add contributor names to the source code.
Also, don’t commit patches authored by others unless they have submitted the patch to the project or you have been authorized to submit them on their behalf (you work together and your company authorized you to contribute the patches, etc.). The author should first submit them to the relevant project’s commit list, development list, or LLVM bug tracker component. If someone sends you a patch privately, encourage them to submit it to the appropriate list first.
When the IR format has to be changed, keep in mind that we try to maintain some backwards compatibility. The rules are intended as a balance between convenience for llvm users and not imposing a big burden on llvm developers:
Note
This section deals with legal matters but does not provide legal advice. We are not lawyers — please seek legal counsel from an attorney.
This section addresses the issues of copyright, license and patents for the LLVM project. The copyright for the code is held by the individual contributors of the code and the terms of its license to LLVM users and developers is the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License (with portions dual licensed under the MIT License, see below). As contributor to the LLVM project, you agree to allow any contributions to the project to licensed under these terms.
The LLVM project does not require copyright assignments, which means that the copyright for the code in the project is held by its respective contributors who have each agreed to release their contributed code under the terms of the LLVM License.
An implication of this is that the LLVM license is unlikely to ever change: changing it would require tracking down all the contributors to LLVM and getting them to agree that a license change is acceptable for their contribution. Since there are no plans to change the license, this is not a cause for concern.
As a contributor to the project, this means that you (or your company) retain ownership of the code you contribute, that it cannot be used in a way that contradicts the license (which is a liberal BSD-style license), and that the license for your contributions won’t change without your approval in the future.
We intend to keep LLVM perpetually open source and to use a liberal open source license. As a contributor to the project, you agree that any contributions be licensed under the terms of the corresponding subproject. All of the code in LLVM is available under the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, which boils down to this:
We believe this fosters the widest adoption of LLVM because it allows commercial products to be derived from LLVM with few restrictions and without a requirement for making any derived works also open source (i.e. LLVM’s license is not a “copyleft” license like the GPL). We suggest that you read the License if further clarification is needed.
In addition to the UIUC license, the runtime library components of LLVM (compiler_rt, libc++, and libclc) are also licensed under the MIT License, which does not contain the binary redistribution clause. As a user of these runtime libraries, it means that you can choose to use the code under either license (and thus don’t need the binary redistribution clause), and as a contributor to the code that you agree that any contributions to these libraries be licensed under both licenses. We feel that this is important for runtime libraries, because they are implicitly linked into applications and therefore should not subject those applications to the binary redistribution clause. This also means that it is ok to move code from (e.g.) libc++ to the LLVM core without concern, but that code cannot be moved from the LLVM core to libc++ without the copyright owner’s permission.
Note that the LLVM Project does distribute dragonegg, which is GPL. This means that anything “linked” into dragonegg must itself be compatible with the GPL, and must be releasable under the terms of the GPL. This implies that any code linked into dragonegg and distributed to others may be subject to the viral aspects of the GPL (for example, a proprietary code generator linked into dragonegg must be made available under the GPL). This is not a problem for code already distributed under a more liberal license (like the UIUC license), and GPL-containing subprojects are kept in separate SVN repositories whose LICENSE.txt files specifically indicate that they contain GPL code.
We have no plans to change the license of LLVM. If you have questions or comments about the license, please contact the LLVM Developer's Mailing List.
To the best of our knowledge, LLVM does not infringe on any patents (we have actually removed code from LLVM in the past that was found to infringe). Having code in LLVM that infringes on patents would violate an important goal of the project by making it hard or impossible to reuse the code for arbitrary purposes (including commercial use).
When contributing code, we expect contributors to notify us of any potential for patent-related trouble with their changes (including from third parties). If you or your employer own the rights to a patent and would like to contribute code to LLVM that relies on it, we require that the copyright owner sign an agreement that allows any other user of LLVM to freely use your patent. Please contact the oversight group for more details.