CMake Wheel: cmeel

Wheel build backend using CMake, to package any CMake project with pip and distribute on PyPI.

Following those relevant PEPs:

• PEP 427, The Wheel Binary Package Format 1.0
• PEP 517, A build-system independent format for source trees
• PEP 518, Specifying Minimum Build System Requirements for Python Projects
• PEP 600, Future ‘manylinux’ Platform Tags for Portable Linux Built Distributions
• PEP 621, Storing project metadata in pyproject.toml
• PEP 639, Improving License Clarity with Better Package Metadata
• PEP 660, Editable installs for pyproject.toml based builds (wheel based)

Chat

https://matrix.to/#/#cmake-wheel:matrix.org

Basic idea

Glue between PEP 517 & 660 entry points and modern CMake standard project configuration / build / test / install, and install in ${PYTHON_SITELIB}/cmeel.prefix/:

• As there is a dot, it is not a valid python module name, so no risk of importing anything there by mistake
• Play well with others, as everything is confined to ${PYTHON_SITELIB}/cmeel.prefix
• ${PYTHON_SITELIB}/cmeel.pth automatically load ${PYTHON_SITELIB}/cmeel.prefix/${PYTHON_SITELIB}, so python packages work out of the box
• Existing ${PYTHON_SITELIB}/cmeel.prefix are automatically added to $CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH, so we can build CMake packages whose dependencies are provided by other packages installed with cmeel
• Stuff in ${PYTHON_SITELIB}/cmeel.prefix/bin is exposed via cmeel.run:cmeel_run, or copied if start with a shebang

Basic pyproject.toml example

extract from https://github.com/cmake-wheel/cmeel-example/blob/main/pyproject.toml:

[build-system]
build-backend = "cmeel"
requires = ["cmeel[build]"]

[project]
authors = [{email = "[email protected]", name = "Guilhem Saurel"}]
description = "This is an example project, to show how to use cmeel"
license = "BSD-2-Clause"
name = "cmeel-example"
requires-python = ">= 3.8"
version = "0.7.0"

[project.urls]
changelog = "https://github.com/cmake-wheel/cmeel-example/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md"
homepage = "https://github.com/cmake-wheel/cmeel-example"
repository = "https://github.com/cmake-wheel/cmeel-example.git"

Complete specification is available at: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/declaring-project-metadata

Install

If you want to use the helpers provided by cmeel, to eg. test building a project in a manylinux container with cmeel docker, the best way to install cmeel is to use pipx: pipx install cmeel

Otherwise, if you just want to use the build backend, there is no need to install anything: your frontent (eg. pip) should do this for you