Better Building of FIRRTL From Source

[jackkoenig]

This allows you to build FIRRTL from source in a much cleaner way. In this repo you can do so in the following way:

# From root of this repo
git clone [email protected]:freechipsproject/firrtl.git
sbt -Dsbt.sourcemode=true -Dsbt.workspace=$PWD

This will use the source checkout of firrtl, having SBT manage both (much better for use with IDEs and other tooling). You can commit those -D arguments in .sbtopts and SBT will pick it up automatically.

There is a companion rocket-chip PR to come.

TODO

• Write doc for this new behavior

Contributor Checklist

• [NA] Did you add Scaladoc to every public function/method?
• Did you add at least one test demonstrating the PR?
• Did you delete any extraneous printlns/debugging code?
• Did you specify the type of improvement?
• Did you add appropriate documentation in docs/src?
• Did you state the API impact?
• Did you specify the code generation impact?
• Did you request a desired merge strategy?
• Did you add text to be included in the Release Notes for this change?

Type of Improvement

• new feature/API (in the build at least)

API Impact

This breaks the firrtl.jar unmanaged dependency technique for building chisel3 with firrtl from source. This new API works a lot better

Backend Code Generation Impact

No impact

Desired Merge Strategy

• • Squash

Release Notes

Improve chisel3 support for building against firrtl from source

Reviewer Checklist (only modified by reviewer)

• Did you add the appropriate labels?
• Did you mark the proper milestone (3.2.x, 3.3.x, 3.4.0, 3.5.0) ?
• Did you review?
• Did you check whether all relevant Contributor checkboxes have been checked?
• Did you mark as Please Merge?

[seldridge]

lgtm

Consider adding docs documentation that this exists. I'm leaving the option of doing this and the merging to you, @jackkoenig.

[jackkoenig]

@seldridge I added some documentation, I intend to merge this once it passes