Qt6: Evaluate conan.io package manager from developer perspective (Kai)

Criteria

• C++ development
• Installation possibilities
• Integration to existing build systems
• Artifacts
• Using extra languages over tools
• Qt developers & application developers

Below just my personal notes.

Getting Conan

Conan has native installers, but it is heavily recommended by their website to use the python installer. I had a Python3 installation on windows, and therefore could just run

pip install conan

This pulled in more 31 additional Python packages (for me), but installation was easy.

Exploring packages

So what packages (or, in conan lingo: recipes) are available? By default only conan.bintray.com is configured as remote, which features around 190 recipes.

Some weirdness: conan search xxx r=all works case sensitively, although the documentation claims it does not (on Windows). Actually I want to search case insensitively, but the option is only -case-sensitive.

Building wip/cmake

Let's check which tools and libs conan provides by default:

perl: Yes strawberryperl/5.28.1.1
cmake: Yes, though not latest: cmake_installer/3.13.0@conan/stable

Building qtbase (wip/cmake) with Conan on Windows

TODO

CMake Integration

There's multiple ways on how to integrate Conan in a CMake app. The default way is intrusive (you change your own cmake scripts), but there's also the possibility to let CMake find modules in Conan by setting CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE.

Open questions

How is package /repository integrity ensured?