Glue

C++ dependency management is hard, is it possible to make it easy?

Rationale

There's no easy way to manage dependencies in the C++ projects.

Existing solutions rely on customizations/patches applied to 3rd party code and/or some kind of central repository to pull pre-built binaries from.

The problem is that it is extreemely hard and time consuming to patch/pre-build each ever created C++ library.

Inspiration

There are some successful tools which provide OS-specific way to manage 'packages':

• Homebrew
• CocoaPods
• Portage
• Sorcery

Philosophy

Build system should produce binaries from source code. Dependency manager should take care about dependencies. KISS FTW.

Key features

• it should be able to pull source code from remote location
• it should be able to drive build process for Makefile, GNU Autotools, CMake, Boost.Build, Meson, Scons -based projects
• it should be able to install multiple versions of the same library
• it should be able to provide dependencies integration for CMake, Meson, Boost.Build build systems
• it should be able to deal with the dependencies of dependencies
• it should work on Windows, Linux, OS X in a uniform way

dependencies.yml

boost:
  git: git@github.com:boostorg/boost.git
  tag: boost-1.62.0
  build:
    unix:
      - bootstrap.sh --prefix=<%= Glue.install_dir %>
    win:
      - bootstrap
  install:
    unix:
      - ./b2 install
    win:
      - b2

gstreamer:
  file: https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/src/gstreamer/gstreamer-1.10.1.tar.xz
  build:
    all:
      - ./configure --prefix=<%= Glue.install_dir %>
      - make
  install:
    all:
      - make install
  dependencies:
    - glib

glib:
  # ...

Usage

• glue install to install dependencies specified in dependencies.yml
• glue generate [cmake|boost|meson] to generate integration files for build system
• glue vendor to copy binary dependencies to ./vendor for packaging