Libraries are cool: don’t reinvent the wheel, don’t repeat yourself, compile once run everywhere… The list of buzzwords could go on!

However it’s often not long before libraries turn into… dependency hell!

How many times your working piece of software stops working because somebody decided that the library you were using was going to change?

And what about your Linux distribution keeping a specific version of it, and when you send the code over to a friend their distribution offers another, and again, your program can’t be built?

Or when checking out some code from GitHub, and running CMake multiple times, because it is unclear of what libraries you’re supposed to have on your system?

And finally, when working on multiple projects, which end up requiring different versions of the same library?

Table of Contents

The need for package managers

System-wide package managers

Package manager is a broad term.

When talking about a Linux distribution, you may be referring to apt, yum, pacman… or homebrew for macOS.

The idea behind these is very simple: for instance, you want to install two applications, one is an email client, the other a web browser.

Among their features, they both need to provide HTML parsing and rendering, and so they use the same library behind the scenes. Therefore, there is no need to download this library twice, as it may be shared between the two.

The package manager keeps track of all the libraries needed for a given application, and of what is currently installed on the system, and acts accordingly.

Application-level package managers

So let’s now turn to a programmer’s use case. During development, developers go shopping, and pick all the libraries that will ease their job and improve the development process and the final outcome.

For a few programming languages this is incredibly easy, think for example Maven for Java, sbt for Scala, or npm for JavaScript.
You just need to define a list of libraries, and they will automatically be downloaded from a repository out on the Internet, specifically at the version you asked for, and with any dependencies they also need.

What about C++?

The title featured Conan, by now you’ll have realised what it is supposed to do. Just like Maven or sbt or npm, you define dependencies for your C++ project in a file (unsurprisingly named conanfile.txt), which may look like this:

[requires]
Poco/1.7.8p3@pocoproject/stable

[generators]
cmake

I suggest going through the excellent documentation to get started.

What could go wrong

Of course, I can see C++ veterans frowning at this. C++ is portable, binaries are not. How are you supposed to throw around packages and just expect them to work? And while you may have ABI compatibility on different Linux distributions, what about Windows and macOS? Or different architectures altogether?

Conan tries to address all this, compiled packages are reused only when possible, meaning somebody else already uploaded a binary for a machine just like yours, or you already have a compiled version of the given library in your local Conan cache.

Otherwise, compilation is done on your machine (à la AUR), even using the options you provide! (e.g. static or shared library).

What makes a package managers

Clearly, there is only one thing that makes a package manager useful, which is, a wide user base. If all developers releasing a new version of their libraries made it available on conan-center on Bintray, it would quickly be widespread, and developing new software would become incredibly easier.

Creating Conan packages

Again, the documentation is excellent in explaining the process.

To accelerate adoption though, you’ll realise dependencies you already rely upon might have to be packaged. Before doing any work, I suggest you head to the wishlist. Here everybody may suggest libraries to be introduced into the conan-center, and cooperate to make it happen.

Sometimes you’ll find out somebody is already on it, or already has a package ready but only released it on their own repository on Bintray. This is because the requirements to upload to the conan-center are quite strict, to ensure good quality and working packages are there.

If you’d like to check Conan out, why don’t you package your library, or help doing the same for a library you often use?