New Issue: Update docs to have people use '--print-chpl-settings' rather than 'printchplenv'

18206, "bradcray", "Update docs to have people use '--print-chpl-settings' rather than 'printchplenv'", "2021-08-11T21:00:31Z"

I often forget about this flag, but chpl supports a --print-chpl-settings flag that is a lot
like running util/printchplenv. This issue proposes that we update our guidance for users
to have them "send us the output of your compile-line with --print-chpl-settings added to
the end" rather than having them run printchplenv. The basic idea is:

  • printchplenv may not be particularly familiar to users, particularly if they haven't done
    their own Chapel install and it's not in their path, or they don't know where $CHPL_HOME
    is (e.g., in a homebrew install, it can be hard to find); in contrast, they're already familiar
    with how to run the compiler if they're filing a but like this.
  • since the compiler's notion of the environment may depend on things like other flags
    passed to it, doing chpl [all the args I was already passing] --print-chpl-settings would
    give a better indication of how the compiler views the environment than how the command
    line prompt views it. As of #18194, it may also make decisions that aren't immediately
    obvious from the command line like "I wasn't built with LLVM support and the user hasn't
    set CHPL_LLVM, so I'd better set it to none to ensure the environment doesn't infer it
    to be bundled or system").

One question to wrestle with here is what we do about anonymizing the output of
--print-chpl-settings (where today, we ask users to send us printchplenv --anonymize).
One option would be to have --print-chpl-settings always anonymize by default and to
have it not anonymize when in developer mode. Alternatively we could:

  • stop asking users to use auto-anonymized data and just let them know that they may wish
    to anonymize
  • support additional options or arguments like -print-chpl-settings-anonymize or the like