Proposal to package eecodes + four short cygport questions + a comment

[brendan detracey]

Hi,
I would like to maintain a package for eccodes (https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/ECC/ecCodes+Home), which is used to process the GRIB weather data format. It is an "optional" prerequisite for cdo  (climate data operators https://code.mpimet.mpg.de/projects/cdo ) , a very powerful climate data command line tool which I would also like to port, pending success with eccodes.
These are somewhat niche applications but are widely used in the earth sciences communities. Anecdotally, there are still people who rely on cygwin to run them, likely because their corporate masters have them trapped using Windows without the admin rights to install either a VM, or WSL1/2. 
The eccodes license is Apache License V2. It builds and tests successfully with cmake. No patching required. All I have to do is write the cygport file.
I get the gist of cygports, but I do not understand the following:
1. After manually installing eccodes myself, its lib folder contains:$ ls lib
cmake/  libeccodes.dll.a  libeccodes_f90.dll.a  pkgconfig/Will I have to add exclusions for the cmake and pkgconfig directories? Or does cygcmake take care of this?
2. Do I understand correctly that I will not have to populate REQUIRES/PKG_REQUIRES in most cases? 
3. PKG_CONTENTS is the manually populated list of files to install?
4. BUILD_REQUIRES is the manually populated list of development packages required to build?
A comment. Took me a day to realize all the cygport examples I would ever need could be found by installing source packages. This is stated indirectly in the "Making a package with cygport" section of package contributors guide .  It would be helpful if it was more explicitly stated. For example, "The cygport file for any cygwin package may be found in /usr/src/package_name after installing the package source using setup-x86_64.exe". It may seem superfluous to those who already know, but to numpties like myself...
So much thanks to the cygwin community, past and present, who kept me productive and sane at work whilst my erstwhile corporate masters made me work 100% on Windows without any admin rights. Dark days indeed.


-------------------------- brendandetracey@yahoo.com