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 = "guilhem.saurel@laas.fr", 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