[CMake] Debian, Redhat, and Cygwin packaging

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Someone showed up on the Chicken mailing list and wants to do Debian 
packaging for Chicken.  I'm looking at what I need to do to support 
packaging systems "in general."  I've noticed several problems already:

- packages tend to duplicate the project's manifest.  Often these 
duplications are maintained by hand, which means they break when someone 
changes something in Chicken proper.  So I am thinking that CMake will 
have to emit some kind of standard manifest that packages can use.

- packages tend to assume that everything is done with ./configure.  Not 
sure yet if it's a technical problem, but it is a political problem.  
For instance, Chicken currently supports both CMake and Autoconf builds, 
but only CMake is supposed to be used for making distros.  But 
volunteers see the Makefile.am and go to town on it.  This means 
CMake-built code isn't getting deployed, which is very much counter to 
my testing and adoption goals.

Is anyone on this mailing list regularly generating Debian, Redhat, or 
Cygwin packaging using CMake as the driving tool?  I'd like to know what 
you're doing.

Also, does CPack address any of this?  Reading the CPack wiki page 
http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake:Packaging_With_CPack
it looks like CPack creates "a package," but not packages that Debian, 
Redhat, or Cygwin gatekeepers are actually going to accept for 
distribution.  Politically, these vectors of package spread are 
important to CMake.  Gotta show these guys that there's more to life 
than ./configure.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every