Re: [Rdkit-devel] [Rdkit-discuss] RDKit packaging issues

[Greg L. <gre...@gm...>]

Dear Gianluca,

On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 10:33 PM, Gianluca Sforna <gi...@gm...> wrote:
> Hi all,
> after spending some time to prepare a Fedora package I have a couple
> remarks/suggestions I'd like to discuss with you in order to make the
> process easier for all the distributions around.

Thanks for looking into this. I've provided some feedback below.

If there are no objections, I suggest we take the rest of this
discussion to the rdkit-devel list since it's probably not one of
general interest.

> Versioning - package manager programs (this is valid in all distros)
> handle updates by comparing versions to decide which one is newer.
> Having names like Q12010, Q22010 etc will break ordering next year
> (Q42010 > Q12011).

Agreed, the internal version number (in
$RDBASE/Code/RDGeneral/versions.h) is already set up this way.

> I suggest you revise how you do name versions; one simple way to avoid
> the issue is to swap year with quarter, so 2010Q4 < 2011Q1. Avoiding
> non numeric versions would be a nice bonus, so you could use to the
> same effect something like "YYYY.MM" (so 2010.12 < 2011.04)

This is ok with me if no one else has objections.

> Installation - files installed by the "make install" step should
> honour the "DESTDIR" environment variable; this is becasue packagers
> need to put files under a certain build directory to be picked up
> later by the packaging script; this is usually accomplished by setting
> the env variable DESTDIR or running "make install DESTDIR=xxx". I also
> need to mention this buildroot (xxx in the example) usually translates
> to "/" when the package is installed, so default installation
> subdirectories should be picked according to common standard naming.
>
> For instance, libraries (lib*.so.*") are usually to be installed in
> /usr/lib{64}, binaries in /usr/bin, header files in /usr/include and
> so on; I believe cmake has all we need to use these these standard
> paths, but I'd need to dig manuals and/or other projects to find out
> the correct spell to cast...

I haven't looked into this part at all; hopefully the CMakeLists.txt
don't have anything that runs counter to this.

>
> I think I could uncover more packaging issues as I proceed, but I
> wanted to kick off some discussions on these points early so we move
> on quicker toward good linux packages.

I guess the problem is going to be installing the directories
$RDBASE/{Docs,Projects,Contrib} and what to do about $RDBASE. Would
putting those into $DESTDIR/share/rdkit and setting $RDBASE to that
work?

Best Regards,
-greg