I don’t know of it ever being written down (and I agree that seems like a bug not a feature!) but this has been discussed before several times over many many years.
That doesn’t mean that it is the policy we need to keep of course, that’s just the status quo.
You’re making several good points here. Could we bring this thread to a new LLVM project level thread instead of a clang-specific one? This is a policy decision that affects the entire project. I not at all wed to the past and welcome relitigation, but we should do that in an open and transparent way with the whole community to avoid subproject specific policies. Once that is done, it is absolutely the right thing to document the outcome.
You may be right that we shouldn’t have these, but I think it is better to overturn (or not) the current implicit policy before making large scale changes like this by fiat.
Are you ok with starting a new first-principles disscusion on the LLVM project channel?
-Chris