CPM.cmake VS conan-center-index

I like to pin GitHub dependencies using a commit hash, instead of a tag. You need a recent CPM.cmake file in your project for CPM to work.

C++20 brings std::format, improving C++ developer experience for formatting strings. If you have to use older standards, though, add fmtlib to your repo. It plays well with CMake and you can use CPM to add fmtlib to your project. The library supports many Rust format macro features, and makes code far cleaner when you need to do string interpolation with variables.

This is true for almost all projects but things are getting better. I use CPM for a couple of years now and get the experience desired

https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake

Yes, i found vcpkg terrible and FetchContent usually works way better. An amazing project is https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake, which automates FetchContent and makes dependencies mostly hassle free.

There's two completely different aspects to your question. 1) How to manage libraries in c++ without dying from cringe? I'd suggest you use cmake as the build system and grab library sources directly from GitHub using this tool: https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake 2) How to get apps that run under WSL to display windows-native windows? I'm not sure, but it's probably this: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

I personally like to use something called CPMCmake for smaller personal projects, just because it has 0 requirements on the person that wants to use your project, they don't have to setup anything on their end, the only requirement is to have Cmake.

I personally would thoroughly recommend CPM. It's a CMake plugin which you install as a script in your CMake project and you can then use its function CPMFindPackage(), which basically wraps find_package() and ExternalProject() to use the former if the package is installed on the machine, or downloads it and builds it in-tree using the latter if not.

At first, I wanted to install it using Vcpkg but I ended up using CPM.cmake instead. Why? Because with Vcpkg on some platform it is messing up the config and choose a version of Python used in Vcpkg instead of the one I wanted to use. It is not that hard to fix, but why bother when I can install the library in one line with CPM.cmake

set(CPM_DOWNLOAD_LOCATION ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/CPM.cmake) file(DOWNLOAD https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake/releases/latest/download/cpm.cmake ${CPM_DOWNLOAD_LOCATION}) include(${CPM_DOWNLOAD_LOCATION})

We're using vcpkg - tried conan previously. I think both are good, but both of them have their own flaws. You can also go with something like https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake if you just want something quick for a small project.

Conan is a package manager for C/C++. See: https://conan.io/.

The way it works is that you can provide "recipes", which are Python scripts, that automate the process of collecting source code (usually from a remote Git repository, or a remote source tarball), patching it, making its dependencies and transitive dependencies available, building for specific platform and architecture (via any number of build systems), then packaging up and serving binaries. There's a lot of complexity involved.

Here are the two recipes I mentioned:

libcurl: https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/master/r...

OpenSSL v3: https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/master/r...

Now, for the sake of this thread I want to highlight three things here:

- Conan recipes are usually made by people unaffiliated with the libraries they're packaging;

- The recipes are fully Turing-complete, do a lot of work, have their own bugs - therefore they should really be treated as software comonents themselves, for the purpose of OSS clearing/supply chain verification, except as far as I know, nobody does it;

- The recipes can, and do, patch source code and build scripts. There's supporting infrastruture for this built into Conan, and of course one can also do it by brute-force search and replace. See e.g. ZLib recipe that does it both at the same time:

https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/7b0ac710... -- `_patch_sources` does both direct search-and-replace in source files, and applies the patches from https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/tree/master/r....

Now, good luck keeping track of what's going on there.

Just checkout ConanCenter https://conan.io/center it's free.

https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index there's 200+ PR that need reviewing :) we add community reviewers fairly often

As for ffmpeg it was last updated 10 days ago https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/commits/master/recipes/ffmpeg/all :)

This is a more complicated recipe https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/master/recipes/pcapplusplus/all/conanfile.py

You can use the Conan package manager with prebuilt binaries/libraries

https://conan.io/center

It's available in Conan too https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/tree/master/recipes/crowcpp-crow though it's not well maintained so no promises if it's working

You need something like https://conan.io/center/ to install the dependencies. You're lucky because it works well with CMake.

This post on github contains a list of packages supported by conan 2.0, its also kept up to date https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/discussions/16196

Use a package manager: https://vcpkg.link/ https://conan.io/center/