Building the CMake Python wheel

Overview

This project has been designed to work with scikit-build.

It provides a setup.py and allows to create both source and binary distributions of CMake.

This is done ensuring source files and build artifacts are copied and/or generated in expected locations.

Prerequisites

In addition of Git, Python and CMake, building the wheel with BUILD_CMAKE_FROM_SOURCE set to ON also requires a C++ Compiler.

Quick start

Build the CMake Python wheel with the following command:

mkvirtualenv build-cmake
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
python setup.py bdist_wheel

Source distribution (sdist)

CMake sources will always be downloaded in the <ROOT>/src directory.

This will ensure that the rules specified in <ROOT>/MANIFEST.in can successfully glob the source files.

The source distribution is generated using the following command:

python setup.py sdist

Binary distribution (build, bdist, bdist_wheel)

The project has two mode of operations:

  1. build CMake from source (BUILD_CMAKE_FROM_SOURCE set to ON)

  2. download CMake binaries (BUILD_CMAKE_FROM_SOURCE set to OFF)

The binary distribution is generated using the following command:

python setup.py bdist_wheel

Changing the default mode is achieved by explicitly passing the option to CMake:

python setup.py bdist_wheel -- -DBUILD_CMAKE_FROM_SOURCE:BOOL=ON

Default value for BUILD_CMAKE_FROM_SOURCE

Depending on the platform, option BUILD_CMAKE_FROM_SOURCE has different default:

  • Linux: ON

  • MacOSX: OFF

  • Windows: OFF

Controlling verbosity

configure and build output

By default, the output associated to the configure and build steps of the CMakeProject-build external project are logged into files. This can be changed by setting the BUILD_VERBOSE option:

python setup.py bdist_wheel -- -DBUILD_VERBOSE:BOOL=1

list of files copied into the distributions

By default, the complete list of files copied into the distributions are reported. This can be changed passing the --hide-listing option:

python setup.py --hide-listing sdist
python setup.py --hide-listing bdist_wheel

Optimizations

On a given platform, when building different “flavor” of CMake python wheels (one for each <python tag>-<abi> tag), the whole process can be made faster in two ways.

Caching downloads

To avoid the re-download of CMake sources and/or binary packages, passing the option -DCMakePythonDistributions_ARCHIVE_DOWNLOAD_DIR:PATH=/path/to/cache enables successive build to re-use existing archives instead of re-downloading them.

Re-using build tree

And finally, on a given platform, to avoid rebuilding CMake, the idea is to first create a standalone build of the CMake project and then building the wheel using it.

Step 1: Standalone build:

mkdir -p standalone-build && cd $_
cmake -DCMakePythonDistributions_ARCHIVE_DOWNLOAD_DIR:PATH=/path/to/cache -G Ninja ../

Step 2: Faster build reusing download and build directories:

python setup.py bdist_wheel -- \
   -DCMakePythonDistributions_ARCHIVE_DOWNLOAD_DIR:PATH=/path/to/cache \
   -DCMakeProject_BINARY_DIR:PATH=/path/to/standalone-build