potato-generator VS conan

This week, I worked on my Static-Site Generator - Potato Generator to add package registry. My SSG is in C++ language. I chose Conan, GitLab, to publish my package officially.

Finally, I moved onto working on Kien's potato SSG. His setup with catch2 is similar to mine, we both have it set up to provide us a main which we compile separately when we want to test it, rather than having it integrated into the program all the time. This made it easy to get started on his, I read his contributing.md which specified one should create a new source file to write their desired test cases, which I did. After messing around with file paths for a bit and figuring out how to get my test to pass, I pushed a commit and created a pull request with a test for his HTMLFile.getTitle() function. Unfortunately I realized with the workflow he had set up this wouldn't trigger his CI so I opted to insert my test case in test.cpp instead to see if it passed his workflow, which thankfully it did.

This week, I set up GitHub Action for my Static Site Generator (SSG). There are several options with C++ language and I picked C/C++ with Make to implement.

You can take a closer look at all the testing files that I created so far and folder structure in the commit.

This week, I work on my Static Site Generator (SSG) - Potato Generator. I plan to implement a source code formatter for my project, which is clang-format and a linter, which is clang-tidy.

This week, I'm working on my Static Site Generator (SSG) - Potato Generator to add a new feature for it.

This week, I work on my Static Site Generator (SSG) in C++ - Potato Generator. After weeks that people worked on and fixed my code. Finally, I have time to revise everything, make my first commit with Git Rebase, Squash and Amend

Back to potato generator, I kept chipping away at it and had it almost ready to go this afternoon when I found I had glossed over the logic for supporting multiple languages in HTML. I didn't realize why he was iterating over the CLI arguments when in my SSG they were always in the same place relative to one another, so I did away with all those loops yesterday only to have to restore them today. After several tests I pushed the changes which (he then merged as well)[https://github.com/kiennguyenchi/potato-generator/pull/12].

This is actually my first time working with Pull Request, and once again I choose Kien Nguyen as my partner for this lab. Based on the previous lab, I have noticed how he writes his program, as well as being familiar with the structure of Kien's program.I also check his repo to see if he would make any changes in his code. And this time, I would love to add Markdown Support Feature in his program. More specifically, I will make some adjustments to process .md file and implement Markdown syntax for Heading 1. This time, I have to be extra careful when modifying his code, I am trying to make less changes as much as possible ^!^. Let see how I make changes to his code in order to support Markdown file mentioned above.

Silly question: What's the difference between C++20 modules and https://conan.io? (Google was vague, and ChatGPT, you know, sometimes makes things up so I rather ask fellow humans...)

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.

There were various approaches recommended depending on our language and ecosystem. My classmates who developed using Node.js were recommended npm, and PyPI or poetry for Python. Since my program is written in C++, I was recommended to look into one of vcpkg or conan, but I ultimately did not use either package manager.

Hi u/instinkt900, Conan maintainer here. Thanks for your feedback! Please remember that we actively monitor and respond to our issue tracker on GitHub (https://github.com/conan-io/conan/issues/new/choose), we’d love to hear about your specific use cases or pain points, so that we can improve your experience and that of other users. The motivation behind most of the updates in Conan 2.0 was precisely feedback from the community, and to improve our ability to continue delivering features in the constantly changing C++ ecosystem. We can certainly do this at a quicker pace, with some exciting new features recently released and in the pipeline: package metadata, transparent backup of downloaded package sources, cache least-recently-used cleanup, etc. A lot of the big decisions that we took for Conan 2.0 were taken with consensus from expert users and contributors (https://conan.io/tribe) and https://github.com/conan-io/tribe. Some specific workflows may not have 1:1 replacements in Conan 2.0, and are likely to affect some of the “less travelled roads” of Conan 1.x, including some features that were always marked as experimental. We are happy to hear feedback so that we can best satisfy these use cases. Conan 2.0 also includes a more sophisticated API to cover cases where the built-in integrations may not satisfy users needs. For what it’s worth - we have also heard very positive feedback from users about how Conan 2.0 simplifies their workflows when compared to Conan 1.x. The C++ tooling ecosystem is fragmented and moves at different speeds, including our users. So it’s always a fine balancing act, but we don’t want to leave anyone behind! An example is Conan Center - over 90% (~1200) of all recipes have been migrated to support Conan 2.0, while still maintaining compatibility with Conan 1.x, precisely to avoid breaking users that are still on Conan 1.x.

Solution: don't use git submodules - use a package manager like Conan or vcpkg.

The closest thing we have at the moment is conan[1]. It’s a cross platform package manager that attempts to implement “toolchains”, whereby different build systems can be integrated[2]. This is a big problem with package management in C/C++, there’s no single, standardised build system that most projects use. There isn’t even a standardised compiler! So when hosting your own packages using Conan, often you need to make sure you build your application for three different compilers, for three different platforms. Sometimes (for modern MacOS) also for two different architectures each.

If you control the compiler AND build system you can get away with just one package for most cases. This true for Microsoft’s C/C++ package manager, NuGet[3]

Historically, the convention has been to use the package manager of the underlying system to install packages, as there are so many different build configurations to worry about when packaging the libraries. The other advantage of using the system package manager is that dependencies (shared libraries) that are common can be shared between many applications, saving space.

[1] https://conan.io/

Anyway, the problems are today starting to get fewer, as more an more adopt standard cross-platform portable build systems, a.k.a. CMake and package managers such as vcpkg or Conan. Together this will take care of building, installing, linking and using the entire dependency tree.

Simply use a package manager: Crypto++ is available on both vcpkg and Conan.

If you want a specific version or provide a more integrated workflow that is easier to use across platforms and among many developers, use a package manager like vcpkg or Conan.

I do however always recommend using a package manager: vcpkg or Conan to install and integrate third party libraries (together with CMake). This normally solves all the typical problems with dependencies.