conan-center-index VS cmake-init-vcpkg-example

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/

If your dep is not on any of those, then you can write your own port with vcpkg very easily like this.

Are they only on git(hub)? You can write a vcpkg overlay port (example) or use FetchContent if the projects are FetchContent ready in a way that doesn't force FetchContent on people trying to build the project (example).

Take a look at cmake-init, vcpkg and this example that shows how to pull dependencies from git(hub) using vcpkg's overlay ports.

cs50 doesn't appear to be present in the MS repo. No problem, you can write your own overlay port. You can find an example for that here: https://github.com/friendlyanon/cmake-init-vcpkg-example

You can take a look at vcpkg or Conan. Maybe vcpkg could be simpler here, because overlay ports are simpler to write than setting up Artifactory for Conan.

Conan and vcpkg are the only options. I use them both, depends on what kinds of dependencies I want to pull. vcpkg is easier to setup custom one-off dependencies with using overlay ports, while Conan is faster at things if your profile fits one that has a pre-built binary in CCI. Both are trivial to integrate with a CMake project, see these examples for Conan and vcpkg.

Here is an example that shows you how to write your own ports for libraries that don't have one provided by vcpkg. The alternative is doing it manually, but eh.

As part of the cmake-init examples I also have an example showing vcpkg integration with a CMake project with exact instructions on what that takes, which also involves CI.

Overlay ports.

IMPORTED targets have directory scope, they aren't global like the other target types. Depending on what your project's type is and how it's used, the correct answer can vary from just requiring a path to be passed on the CLI to proper package management usage (e.g. vcpkg)