Overview

Conan is pretty popular package manager. It’s very useful to not keep all you thirdparty dependecies up-to-date manually.

Pros

• Very easy to update dependencies

Cons

• Another level of abstraction above CMake
• Additional learning curve to Conan’s API
• Dependencies may pull own dependencies normally you would rid of
• Need to configure each dependency via conanfile

Migration

Project build

Typical project build with CMake looks like:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .

With Conan at first we need to make sure that our profile is configured:

conan profile detect --force

Then every build will use CMake profiles instead of typical builds:

conan install . --output-folder=build --build=missing
cmake --preset conan-default
cmake --build --preset conan-release

Conclusion

Hence it’s a popular solution for big companies to package libraries, ordinary user might find it pretty complicated. Here I didn’t even cover packaging part. I think I gonna update the post later…