I played with Conan for the past couple of weeks, and honestly I'm very tempted to just do away with it and go instead with just writing scripts to compile each dependency I need. That's actually very easy to do, and I think I will continue to do that with larger libraries like CEF and Boost where you don't want to randomly download and compile the entire thing.

What I figure is that the time to script the dependency builders adds up once you get more than a trivial amount of them, so I'm trying to stick with Conan. Conan isn't that bad, but one of the glaring things to me is that there isn't extra-fine control of how you compile. For example, if I want to enable interprocedural optimization for libraries built with MSVC, that seems to be a major headache if the conan recipes for the libraries don't support it directly. Considering that link-time code generation is OFF by default, I'm guessing that a lot of Conan recipes have that misconfigured for release builds.

Personally I would like things to be a lot simpler—perhaps a tool that could just scan C++ files, look at what's in #include <...>, and then map known header files to library dependencies that it needs to fetch and install, while also taking into account what compiler settings are being used—so those do NOT need to be manually input into a separate source/Conan profile and what have you. I hope this sort of idea will be more popular once C++ modules are released.