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so, these are different formats of the same data, so I would not call them the same thing

your change still looks like an improvement though, other than the commit message

"LLVM IR" is the abstract idea, bitcode being one way to format IR

Just fyi, not all LLVM tooling can handle both.
LLVM bc has magic bytes set, which provide information to certain tools.
I tried to pass llvm IR files to them and the GPU offload tools failed, which back then took me a bit to figure out since I also first thought they'd be interchangeable. I'm not sure if that's worth mentioning.

Strange because on https://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#introduction we can read

The three different forms of LLVM are all equivalent.

Maybe what you see is a bug?

I think it's not a bug. The reason I was given was that parsing the full llvm-IR to understand it is an unreasonable amount of work for arbitrary llvm tools, checking the first magic bytes of a .bc file is a much easier and more reasonable requirement.

cc @kevinsala can you confirm that you can not always pass both .ll and .bc files to llvm tools? The openmp slack unfortunately already deleted the discussion. I think Joseph answered back then.