Implement cross-platform build using a package manager (especially Windows 10)

[ShamanTcler]

I am considering trying it with Win 10 MSVS 2015 and 64 bit

[thclark]

Not to my knowledge, @ShamanTcler but if you succeed then please feel free to make a PR if there are W10-specific modifications you make to CMakeLists.

You might be advised to ask the same question over at nlohmann/json because that's a significant dependency.

Another thing that might help is that the cpr module is presently a dependency but I'm likely to get rid of it soon enough. If it turns out that's a nightmare on W10 please let me know and I'll get rid of that chunk of functionality.

[ShamanTcler]

Well part of the question was quick probe to see if this project was still alive ... you responded in less than an hour so yup still alive :)

I will likely convert the CMake's over to use Conan ( conan.io ) a C++ package manager.

I just checked and Conan has:

• https://conan.io/center/nlohmann_json/3.7.3/ JSON so that is easy enough.
• https://conan.io/center/cpr/1.3.0/.
• https://conan.io/center/eigen/3.3.7/
• https://conan.io/center/boost/1.73.0

So this might be quite doable.

BTW Conan is cross platform I use it in Win/*nix... make managing packages easier. At work I run an Artifactory CE instance to house and distribute all the Conan packages.

[ShamanTcler]

Does this mean you find Conan interesting? Chuckle

[thclark]

It's alive! I use it for other more active projects, (both open and closed source) so it appears dormant for months then gets poked every time something goes wrong :)

Mainly, the reward I get is the satisfaction of people using it so the more people there are on here, the more I'm likely to actually wake up and do stuff. You're my first issue poster. Congrats :)

I'd intended to chuck it onto vcpkg at some point, not having used Conan... but if you can share how you did it with Conan (how does it work? You make a configuration file of some kind?) I'll happily accept a PR and maintain that going forward - it's about time I did some proper release versioning for the library too so clearly now's the time.

I've requested access to their EAP as instructed here so ultimately you can just install from Conan.

[thclark]

Does this mean you find Conan interesting? Chuckle

I knew Conan actually, but it seems like they've done quite a bit of work since I last looked at it. I'd anticipated vcpkg taking off a lot more than it has, so was hanging around for that!

[thclark]

OK @ShamanTcler I hooked up conan and ran a new release. Try this... it uses conan and might just work!