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Comment by daemin | Hacker News Reader

I may be in the minority but I like that C++ has multiple package managers, as you can use whichever one best fits your use case, or none at all if your code is simple enough.

It's the same with compilers, there's not one single implementation which is the compiler, and the ecosystem of compilers makes things more interesting.

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Multiple package managers is fine, what's needed is a common repository standard (or even any repository functionality at all). Look at how it works in Java land, where if you don't want to use Maven you can use Gradle or Bazel or what have you, or if you hate yourself you can use Ant+Ivy, but all of them share the same concept of what a dependency is and can use the same repositories.

Also, having one standard packaging format and registry doesn't preclude having alternatives for special use cases.

There should be a happy path for the majority of C++ use cases so that I can make a package, publish it and consume other people's packages. Anyone who wants to leave that happy path can do so freely at their own risk.

The important thing is to get one system blessed as The C++ Package Format by the standard to avoid xkcd 927 issues.

That would actually be pretty cool. Though I think there might have been papers written on this a few years ago. Does anyone know of these or have any updates about them?

CPS[1] is where all the effort is currently going for a C++ packaging standard, CMake shipped it in 4.3 and Meson is working on it. Pkgconf maintainer said they have vague plans to support at some point.

There's no current effort to standardize what a package registry is or how build frontends and backends communicate (a la PEP 517/518), though its a constant topic of discussion.

[1]: https://github.com/cps-org/cps

In the Linux world and even Haiku, there is a standard package dependacy format, so dependencies aren’t really a problem. Even OSX has Homebrew. Windows is the odd man out.

Are you talking about system/application dependencies for installed applications or programming dependencies like compiled libraries and header files?

On the contrary, most Linux distributions use platform-specific global-only packaging formats for C++ libraries, and if anything I think that's holding back the development of a real, C++-native packaging/dependency manager.

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