death to kdeaddons, long live extragear!

Alexander Neundorf neundorf at kde.org
Thu Aug 30 23:00:26 BST 2007


On Thursday 30 August 2007 03:43, Marc Espie wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 10:15:31PM -0400, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
...
> > E.g. it would make creating user/development packages easy (if we extend
> > our install commands) and we would have an all-in-one solution.
>
> I actually know a bit about packaging, not surprisingly.
> First, rpm and deb only cover a large part of linux distributions, but not
> everything linux (all BSD use something different for starters). Second,

Yes. 
In the BSD distros pkgsrc is quite common, i.e. building from sources ? 
Slackware Linux still uses tgz for binary packages, the BSDs too or do they 
have something different ?

> packaging needs very little support from make systems. The most important
> feature, in fact, is to be able to separate *packaging* from installation,
> namely, you just want correct DESTDIR support, that works as far as it
> can *without installing stuff on the actual live system*, but putting
> everything in a separate area.

With cpack you basically include CPack and set up some variables, and that's 
all, cmake will generate a target "package", which will build the package in 
the selected format(s).
Basically it does "make install" with special support for the cmake COMPONENT 
feature and packs this up into the package.
This is indeed very convenient, you don't need to care how to call some 
special packaging tool e.g. for deb or rpm.
It needs more users, so it can get more polishing.

> The actual packaging problem is mostly impossible to automate simply. It
> involves tracking dependencies, finding update paths that work (if possible
> minimizing the amount of scripting that always fucks up), and in many
> cases, identifying issues with less needed dependencies.

Yes, cmake/cpack can't help with that a lot (it can tell you which software 
packages were used using FIND_PACKAGE(), cmake cvs records this information).

Bye
Alex

P.S. how is cmake doing on OpenBSD ? You have a lot of patches as I saw. The 
main one is the one dealing with the library version numbers ?
All the others are security related, right ?




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