Index: llvm/trunk/docs/CodingStandards.rst
===================================================================
--- llvm/trunk/docs/CodingStandards.rst
+++ llvm/trunk/docs/CodingStandards.rst
@@ -1232,6 +1232,11 @@
 code for this branch. If the compiler does not support this, it will fall back
 to the "abort" implementation.
 
+Neither assertions or ``llvm_unreachable`` will abort the program on a release
+build. If the error condition can be triggered by user input, then the
+recoverable error mechanism described in :doc:`ProgrammersManual` or
+``report_fatal_error`` should be used instead.
+
 Another issue is that values used only by assertions will produce an "unused
 value" warning when assertions are disabled.  For example, this code will warn:
 
Index: llvm/trunk/docs/ProgrammersManual.rst
===================================================================
--- llvm/trunk/docs/ProgrammersManual.rst
+++ llvm/trunk/docs/ProgrammersManual.rst
@@ -441,6 +441,14 @@
 as simple as reporting the issue to the user, or it may involve attempts at
 recovery.
 
+.. note::
+
+   Ideally, the error handling approach described in this section would be
+   used throughout LLVM. However, this is not yet the case. For
+   non-programmatic errors where the ``Error`` scheme cannot easily be
+   applied, ``report_fatal_error`` should be used to call any installed error
+   handler and then terminate the program.
+
 Recoverable errors are modeled using LLVM's ``Error`` scheme. This scheme
 represents errors using function return values, similar to classic C integer
 error codes, or C++'s ``std::error_code``. However, the ``Error`` class is