spdlog VS conan-center-index

Why a new lib instead of using or contributing to an existing one as spdlog?

https://github.com/gabime/spdlog

GitHub repo: gabime/spdlog

SpdLog https://github.com/gabime/spdlog

The usual recommendation when logging libraries are brought up is spdlog, which is however header-only. It's available on Conan-center.

* Aha! In digging up the docs for NDC, I found this[1], which does mention a book for your reading list: "Patterns for Logging Diagnostic Messages" part of the book "Pattern Languages of Program Design 3" edited by Martin et al.

[1] https://github.com/gabime/spdlog

FetchContent_Declare( spdlog GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/gabime/spdlog GIT_TAG origin/v1.x ) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(spdlog)

Typically, you'd use a logging library to handle stuff like this. I personally like spdlog. You use different logger functions (info, warn, error) and depending on what level you have set for the logger (or globally) some of the functions become no-ops. E.g. When not running in verbose mode all spdlog::info() do nothing.

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/