GAP Packaging Guidelines

The main GAP package and its attendant libraries and help system are in packages named gap, gap-libs, gap-core, gap-online-help, gap-rpm-macros, gap-devel, gap-vim, and libgap. To distinguish add-on packages from these core packages, add-ons MUST have names of the form gap-pkg-foo. For example, the FGA add-on is named gap-pkg-fga.

Architecture-independent (noarch) packages MUST be installed in %{gap_libdir}/pkg/%{pkgname}, and architecture-specific packages in %{gap_archdir}/pkg/%{pkgname}, where %{pkgname} expands to the GAP name for the add-on.

GAP add-ons are written to be installed simply by unpacking them in an existing GAP directory tree. For most add-ons, the only build action necessary is building the documentation. However, since the add-on authors assumed this would happen within the GAP tree, add-ons freely use relative paths to access GAP files. For example, packages that use TTH to build documentation (see below) commonly invoke ../../../convert.pl. The RPM spec file MUST account for this, either by altering the add-on to point to paths under %{gap_libdir}, or by creating symbolic links to create the appearance that the build is taking place inside the GAP tree. If the add-on is altered for the build, the spec file SHOULD arrange for the original (unaltered) files to be installed, so that paths are correct after installation.

GAP add-ons are frequently distributed in tarballs with a top-level directory of the form addon-version. The add-on SHOULD be installed without the version number. Documentation for one package often crosslinks into documentation for other packages. If the directories involved contain version numbers, then the crosslinks can be broken by a package upgrade. Avoid this situation by omitting the version numbers. GAP itself can retrieve the version number from the add-on’s PackageInfo.g file, so no information is lost.

All add-ons MUST include BuildRequires: gap-devel, as that package contains essential tools needed for compiling binary modules and building documentation, as well as a set of RPM macros for use in spec files. Each add-on also MUST contain a BuildRequires that is dependent on the documentation style used by the GAP add-on.

All add-ons MUST include Requires: gap-core, either directly or transitively. In addition, dependencies on other GAP packages, as recorded in PackageInfo.g, MUST be specified, with the exception of GAPDoc, as noted above. GAP has a 2-level dependency system, specified with NeededOtherPackages and SuggestedOtherPackages tags in PackageInfo.g. How these dependencies map onto the 3-level RPM dependency system of Requires, Recommends, and Suggests is left to the discretion of the Fedora packager.

GAP add-ons are intended to be unpacked in place within a GAP directory tree. Ordinarily, the entire distribution directory is copied into %{gap_libdir}/pkg or %{gap_archdir}/pkg. This includes the documentation directories, which are consumed by the tools contained in gap-online-help. However, some files are not needed in the final install directory. Files that should not appear there include:

Note that License files MUST still be included in the package with the %license tag, and other documentation such as README files can be included as %doc.

The %gap_copy_docs macro is intended to make installation of documentation files easier. For most packages, ensure that the doc subdirectory exists in the buildroot, then invoke the macro without arguments in %install. For special cases, two optional arguments can be given:

Since GAP documentation MUST be installed under %{gap_libdir}/pkg or %{gap_archdir}/pkg for the builtin documentation browser to find it, such documentation SHOULD NOT be duplicated with %doc. However, the documentation SHOULD still be marked as such so that documentation-free installs work as expected. Most add-ons SHOULD include %docdir declarations in the %files section of the spec file; e.g., %docdir %{gap_libdir}/pkg/%{pkgname}/doc and %docdir %{gap_libdir}/pkg/%{pkgname}/htm.

Other RPM macros that may be useful for GAP add-on spec files include the following: