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Conan Setup and Recipe Pre-requisites#

You will very likely need to maintain custom(ized) Conan recipes in order to use this system. If you are starting from scratch, you can find good recipes to work from in the Conan Center Index

install_prefix option in conanfile.py for each non-relocatable tool in the chain#

Non-relocatable packages require support for our install_prefix option.

For GNU tools, the Conan Autotools integration already supports the autoconf --prefix option, so it's a simple recipe modification. Again, while it's ideal to use across all tools, most GNU tools are relocatable and do not require this modification.

  • generate() needs to pass in this prefix when constructing AutotoolsToolchain
if self.options.install_prefix:
    tc = AutotoolsToolchain(self, prefix=self.options.install_prefix)
else:
    tc = AutotoolsToolchain(self)

Non-standard Conan Usage

Conan specifically tries to avoid hardcoding installation prefix into its builds. For the standard Conan use-case supporting product development and release, hardcoded paths work against portability.

When adding support for our install_prefix option, make sure to do so in a way that does not break the standard use case!

Local Conan recipe index#

Since we need to modify some recipes, you may wish to fork the public ConanCenter recipe database if you're not writing your own recipes from scratch. You will need custom recipes for any special build configurations not already supported by package options,

$ conan remote add conancenter-local ./conan-center-index
$ conan remote disable conancenter
conancenter: https://center2.conan.io [Verify SSL: True, Enabled: False]
$ conan remote list
conancenter: https://center2.conan.io [Verify SSL: True, Enabled: False]
conancenter-local: /workspaces/ConanToolchain/src/demo/toolchain/conan-center-index [local-recipes-index, Enabled: True]
$

Maintaining the Conan Package Index#

Sample Conan Package Index Directory Tree
recipes
├── gcc
│   └── all
│       ├── conandata.yml
│       ├── conanfile.py
│       └── test_package
└── binutils
    └── all
        ├── conandata.yml
        ├── conanfile.py
        └── test_package