CMake, CPack (was: Re: Summary of the 2008-10-21 Packaging Committee meeting)

[Kevin Kofler]

Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs <at> math.uh.edu> writes:
> * Cpack guidelines
> ** https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/CmakeCpack
> ** The committee was unclear as to how this applied to packaging
>    guidelines at all, as it seems to contain tips for upstream
>    developers instead of instructions for Fedora packagers.

Indeed, CPack is unsuitable for building official Fedora packages for several 
reasons (it does not generate source RPMs [1], it treats the specfile as an 
implementation detail and hides it from the developer and it's extremely 
unlikely the specfiles it generates are compliant with our guidelines, I've 
seen horrible things in autogenerated specfiles).

Fedora specfiles should be either handwritten entirely or generated with a 
specfile generator (e.g. cpan2spec) and then hand-edited to follow the 
guidelines (and of course to actually build, e.g. by filling in the missing 
fields if the generator you used is just a template generator like the one in 
the rpmdevtools).

It is not hard to write a specfile for the average CMake-using package: please 
see this template:
https://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/4/40/SIGs_KDE_KDE4FAQ_kde4_foo.spec
for KDE 4 applications; for non-KDE applications using CMake, use the %build 
and %install sections (and %check where applicable) from:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/cmake
instead.

[1] http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake:CPackPackageGenerators#RPM_.28Unix_Only.29

        Kevin Kofler