[vtk-developers] CMake. nightlies, RPMs etc.

[Prabhu Ramachandran]

hi,

Been using the new 4.0 tree for a while and I like it quite a bit. I
did have a little trouble and want to share my experiences.  BTW the
new JPEG/PNG Writers/Readers are cool!

CMake issues:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^

When building, I used CMakeSetup (FLTK version).  This refers to CMake
version 0.93 checked out from CVS.  Maybe this part of the message
should go to the CMake lists but I dont know.

  (1) It ran pretty well, except the list widgets gave me trouble and
  there were focus related problems and I had to a little voodoo
  before I could see a cursor inside a text entry area.

  (2) While building python I had left the python library as
  "NOTFOUND" (you dont need to link against a library when building
  vtk-python).  Thinking this was some kind of special string that
  ignores this option I left it alone.  Unfortunately, it tried
  linking the python lib with -lNOTFOUND and obviously bombed.  I then
  redid CMakeSetup and made the string empty.  Now it builds fine.  Is
  this a bug/feature?
  
  (3) CMake itself seems to support no command line arguments.  I
  can't even do $ cmake --version.


Nightlies page:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The VTK web pages mention a nightly set of RPMs etc.

http://public.kitware.com/vtkhtml/getSoftwareNightly.html

    (1) What version of VTK is this?  What version of Python, Tcl/Tk,
    Java are necessary for the Windows and Linux RPMs?

    (2) On what platform are the RPMs built?  What version of various
    libraries does it need?

    (3) How did you build the RPMs?  The vtk 4.0 tree has a
    spec file and patch that will not work for the tree.

This information has to be kept updated and its not hard to do it.  I
assume you have a pretty standard setup that you dont change each
night, you just have to do it once.  If you don't have the time for
this please consider answering the above questions and I will try to
create a README or edit the HTML and mail it back to you - or even
commit it via cvs if possible.


RPMS:
^^^^^

With the move to CMake how do we generate RPMs?  I dont mind spending
some time re-working the spec file.  But I need some basic info.

   (1) RPM's are designed for automatic building.  Typically one uses
   configure with a bunch of options to configure the software, then
   make it and finally package it.  Now CMake seems to read everything
   from the CMakeCache.txt.  How can we make an automatic script based
   build?

	(a) One option is of course, to use a standard CMakeCache.txt
	(configured for a particular setup) and then build on one
	system that generates the RPMs.

	(b) The other is to somehow let CMake know of the options we
	want via the command line.  Is this possible?

   What do you recommend?

   (2) Is it worth building RPMs anymore or should we shift to a
   tarball based binary release?  There are so many RPM based
   distros. that it might be madness to provide RPMs for all of them.
   What do you folks think?



thanks,
prabhu

-- 
Those who hate and fight must stop themselves -- otherwise it is not
stopped.
		-- Spock, "Day of the Dove", stardate unknown