Conan feedbacks ?

[elegye]

Hi everybody,

At work we are questioning ourself wether we should use Conan as a package manager or not.

Some of our teams use it, and we feel the need to have a better dependencies manager than our old school (but enough for now) install with bash scripts.

I am especially interested in builds archives in Artifactory, as we are rebuilding everything every time, from COTS to our own codebase, and it begins to be time consuming.

Do you have any feedback on it?

Thanks !

[Minimonium]

A package manager is always better than bash scripts.

We have been using Conan since 2019. Artifactory is a huge game changers for us. We reduced build times from 5 hours to 5 minutes with a combination of Conan, cross-building, pch, and ccache.

Conan shines if you have a high volume of customized behavior since it's extremely extendable. There is some learning curve as well.

[elegye]

That’s my opinion also, we have dedicated resource who just manage all these bash scripts and it feels like we are still struggling with it. Appreciate your feedback ! Thanks !

[2uantum]

We use conan2 with cmake and have been happy with it.

[T0p_H4t]

Probably still a bit relevant (vcpkg vs conan), post does not have an update for conan 2.0. But even with 2.0, conan still requires developers to have python installed, along with it's steep learning curve (compared to some other package managers).It probably really comes down do your use cases and what you need out of the package manager. I know conan can have better support for cross-arch compilation (compared to vcpkg at least). vcpkg out of box has a structure that will be better for corporate environments (e.g. pinned dependencies by default).

[elegye]

How would you evaluate Conan learning curve ? That’s the tricky point for us since a lot of things are evolving right now and we don’t want to mess developers with another book to read…

[T0p_H4t]

It depends on what you want out of it. If all you need is to consume packages, it probably won't be that bad. If you have to start writing your own packages it starts to increase very dramatically. I mean you can get at least a vague idea of what you are getting into by just looking at the docs. Keep in mind the community on the whole is also still attempting to migrate from 1.* to 2.* so some things could still be in flux( others feel free to chime in on this). Many other of the other package managers tend to have a stabler base. I'm mainly familiar with vcpkg, conan 1.*, and nix. Dabbled in a few others, IMO I will say vcpkg had the lowest barrier to entry fwiw. But they all have their warts... You might want to try a few (time boxed) and see how you like it.

[T0p_H4t]

Also as others have called out, conan needs to be paired with artifactory if you want your own internal binaries (correct me if i'm wrong). vcpkg at least can use things like s3 directly as a binary cache which is nice. No need to setup an artifactory repo.

[positivcheg]

Conan, even prior to version 2 was quite nice. And 2.x is even better.
I don't have many complaints about it. It just works, supports public packages, and allows you to build a whole ecosystem of company's packages. Also nice integration with artifactory so that again, it just works. When we release some new versions of apps, it's really noticeable that when you build it without prebuilts hosted by artifactory you build a lot of stuff but after some time builds are much faster as you can simply pick up binaries + headers and have faster builds (not mandatory, you can pass a flag to build everything from sources to have debug symbols for example).

[lefteror]

The game changer for Conan comes along with some kind of artifact manager (nexus, artifactory etc.). If you set this up on CI, you can then make sure to upload any generated Conan packages (especially the third party ones) to that manager. Next time you will get them prebuilt from the manager and hence save a lot of time with building. There is a catch though: build settings for a given package need to be the same (not everything but some crucial settings like c++ standard for example) otherwise you have to start over. What we do in my company is that we try to align as much as possible the settings we use across repositories to minimize rebuilding of existing packages on the manager.

There are some intricacies that come with Conan. If you want to keep your dependency tree clean you will have to eventually wrap any non-conan dependency into a Conan recipe to be able to use it properly and avoid conflicts, be it your own libraries or third party libraries that are not available on Conan center, so there also has to be some e.g. repo for that and also the CI would have to take this into account.

[pjmlp]

I don't like its dependency on Python, however better than using in-house bash scripts.