[CMake] regarding adding first-class RPM and DPKG support to CPack

[Philip Lowman]

I gave some thought towards working on adding first-class RPM and DPKG
support to CPack tonight.  I was just wondering if anyone has toyed
around with this idea as of late or if this is something that the CMake
project would even be interested in adding.  Obviously, I'm just talking
binary package support at this point.

The idea would be to abstract as much commonality as possible between
the engines into the CPack interface to allow users to start off with
simple binary packages that do the basics like package up all binary
files and libraries and deploy them in /usr by default.

Things like automatic dependency scanning could be enabled by default
since both RPM and DPKG support it.  There could also be a means for the
user to specify additional dependencies if they wanted to if this didn't
prove too difficult to unify between the engines.  Of course I haven't
quite thought through the ramifications of users manually adding
dependencies.  Sometimes in the Debian world different control files are
used for different distributions and sometimes this is needed in the RPM
world as well although I think it's generally frowned upon if possible.
 Any kind of manual dependency declarations would likely have to take
this into consideration which could complicate the design (i.e. having
to support more than one "Debian" and one "RPM" packaging)

There would likely be a way to allow the user to use their own hand
coded .spec files or a set of debian/* files.  This would be needed if
the user wanted a non-trivial .spec or control file (i.e. containing
more than one package).  By default, I could configure CPack to only
effect binary builds of these custom files but I'm fairly certain people
could implement the commands to build the source code and effectively
end up with SRPMS and source DPKG files.

Anyways, does this sound interesting to anyone?

-- 
Philip Lowman
Simulation Development Engineer, Modeling and Simulation Technology
General Dynamics Land Systems
http://www.gdls.com