[CMake] Managing a local installation of cmake-built open source packages

[ardi]

Thanks a lot, Elisabeth, Domen, Guillaume, and Konstantin,

I believe spack is the closest to what I need. However, all these
solutions (hunter, conan, spack...) have perhaps their strongest focus
in packaging, dependencies, automatic downloads, etc... while I prefer
to do all such tasks myself. I prefer to not have packages, just
download the source in the original developer provided form, untar it,
and to even build it on my own, following the developer instructions.
In other words, I want to be as little intrusive as possible, keeping
the original distribution file as is. Once it's built, then it's the
install phase what is critical, because a previous version of the
package might need to be uninstalled, or there might even be files
with equal names across different packages, as Domen pointed out.

As I said, I think spack is the closest. However, I feel it tries to
automate too much the build. Yes, it gives you a lot of customization
options, but I'm not sure the complexity is worth the effort.

However, I think I can follow the spack design without using spack:
Install every project on a different prefix. Then just keep on the
environment CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX set to a colon separated list of all
prefixes of all installed projects, and that's it.

Uninstalling is trivial: delete the installation directory.
Keeping several versions of the same package is trivial too: just set
the currently used version in CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
Updating is trivial as well: Install new version to a new prefix, and
either keep or delete the installation directory of the previous
version, and update CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX accordingly.

Of course spack does all this automatically for you, but it does a lot
more, and, as I said, I'm not sure the added complexity and automation
is worth the effort.

I think that by using this approach, I could reconsider moving to
spack in the future (I'd likely have to install all packages from
scratch if I move to spack later, but my directory hierarchy will end
up being the same, so all the work I do now -writing code and
projects- would be reusable without modification).

Thanks a lot for all your ideas!!


On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 12:25 AM, Elizabeth A. Fischer
<elizabeth.fischer at columbia.edu> wrote:
> Ardi,
>
> What you describe is pretty much what Spack does.  I would take a look at
> it, see if it meets your needs.  Chances are, at least some of the packages
> you need are already included in Spack:
>
> https://github.com/llnl/spack
>
> -- Elizabeth
>
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 12:39 PM, ardi <ardillasdelmonte at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I want to install (on UNIX-like systems) a collection of open source
>> packages which use cmake as the build tool, but I need the
>> installation to be performed in a local directory (inside my home
>> directory), and I wish convenient updating to new versions of the
>> packages.
>>
>> I didn't arrive to a convincing solution, so any advice will be welcome.
>>
>> Here are my thoughts:
>>
>> The trivial solution is of course to directly install to a non-root
>> prefix when invoking cmake, but, however, this isn't well suited for
>> updating a previous installation of the packages (building and
>> installing a new version will only overwrite files that have the same
>> name, but it will keep old files that no longer exist in the new
>> version, cluttering the local installation directory with no longer
>> needed and mismatched files).
>>
>> A possibility would be to keep a copy of install_manifest.txt whenever
>> I install a package, and remembering to always run 'xargs rm <
>> install_manifest.txt' before installing a different version of a
>> previously installed package.
>>
>> But keeping the install_manifest.txt of each installed package (and
>> using it before updating a package) looks like a too-manual task,
>> candidate to some kind of automation.
>>
>> Another (perhaps wiser) possibility would be to use cpack for creating
>> either a RPM or DEB, and then use the corresponding package manager to
>> install the package. But this has problems too: most package managers
>> assume a / root installation directory. Also, I use several OSs: OSX,
>> Linux, and some BSDs, and I'm not sure that either the RPM nor the DEB
>> pkg managers will work flawlessly across all the OSs I use.
>>
>> What would you recommend here?
>>
>> Thanks a lot!
>> --
>>
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