Question about library installation + finding carma about carma

[peekxc]

Hi @RUrlus. Thanks for looking into this. A pip-installeable version would definitely be ideal, if possible.

That being said, I actually had not heard of ci-buildwheels and did not consider the use of CI's to automate package (wheel) building and distribution. Thanks for the tip!

[RUrlus]

Hi @peekxc,

Yes CARMA is currently tied to CMake, however, you could install it your system library using CMake, which will create a default config.h, and then use your preferred build system:

cmake ..
cmake --build . --target install

A downside of this approach is that you will need to make sure that CARMA is always included before Armadillo.
There is no easy way around this, ARMA_ALIEN_MEM_* need to be set before including Armadillo. The CMake target handles by pre-compiling the required header. Hence, the recommendation to use the CMake build.

Regarding Python, I would advise to ship CARMA in the tar and use something like ci-buildwheels to create wheels for the various platforms. Pybind11 documentation has various examples on how to integrate CMake build in setup.py

CARMA is currently missing the required files for find_package but I will pick that up.

I am open to a PR for pkgconfig or something similar

[RUrlus]

@peekxc I had a look today and I see some ways to improve usability.
I included a default config.h so it header-only independent of CMake.

I am working on a better CMake installation and targets, provide it as a pip package like Pybind11.
I am not familiar with pkgconfig but if it's not too much work I'll include that as well.