CppCon 2024

The Common Package Specification (CPS) is an important initiative to improve the C and C++ tooling ecosystem (and developers life). Last year CppCon2023 talks and discussions have been followed up with continuous work in the specification. This talk advances in the topic by presenting a working implementation of usage of CPS files in Conan C++ package manager and describing the different challenges, approaches and lessons learned in the process.

First, it will be presented how the current package information in ConanCenter allows the automatic creation of CPS files for many tens of thousands of packages for most of the popular C and C++ open source libraries. Even if that is not the end goal and expected flow of the CPS, this can provide an invaluable resource for experimentation and validation of both the specification and tools using it.

Then, the generation and management of CPS files inside packages will be described, including the challenges of managing multiple binary configurations, how to mix them with system-installed packages and how to consume them, both in single and multi-configuration scenarios.

Finally, how the mapping from CPS files to the different build systems (CMake, Meson, Autotools, MSBuild) is implemented via the generation of build-system specific files will be presented.

The talk will conclude with a summary of the lessons learned, open issues and discussion about the future.